Senses, Brain & Response Explorer

Your body collects information every second. Explore how your five senses send signals to your brain, how your brain decides what to do, and how some animals can sense things humans cannot.

Senses, Brain & Response Explorer

Pick a situation and follow the signal from your sense organ all the way to your response.

Pick a situation to explore:

⚾Stimulus
→
👁Sense Organ
→
⚡Nerve Signal
→
🧠Brain
→
🙌Response
⚾

Step 1: Stimulus

A stimulus happens: "You see a ball flying toward you". Something in the environment changes and your body needs to notice it.

Senses Reference

The Five Senses

  • Sight: eyes detect light and color
  • Hearing: ears detect sound waves
  • Smell: nose detects airborne chemicals
  • Taste: tongue detects dissolved chemicals
  • Touch: skin detects pressure, heat, and pain

Stimulus to Response

Every response follows the same basic path:

  1. A stimulus occurs (sound, sight, touch)
  2. A sense organ detects it
  3. A nerve signal travels to the brain
  4. The brain processes the information
  5. The body makes a response

Nerves and the Brain

  • Optic nerve carries signals from eyes to visual cortex
  • Auditory nerve carries signals from ears to auditory cortex
  • Olfactory nerve carries smell signals to olfactory bulb
  • Gustatory nerve carries taste signals to taste cortex
  • Sensory nerves carry touch signals to somatosensory cortex

Animal Super-Senses

  • Dogs: smell 100,000x better than humans
  • Eagles: vision 4-8x sharper, see ultraviolet light
  • Bats: echolocation maps objects in total darkness
  • Sharks: detect electric fields from other animals
  • Mantis shrimp: 16 color receptors vs human's 3