Relative importance of human senses

¶ … Sight

The human sense of sight is the most important of our five senses. Each of our senses allows us to perceive important facets of our environment. However, sight provides us with much more information about our immediate environment than the other senses, causing people to tend to list sight as their most important sense. Sight allows us the unique advantage of obtaining information at a great distance; an advantage not provided by any of the other senses. At the same time, we perceive information best when all of our five senses are engaged. This is especially true of children, who learn best in the classroom when all senses are used.

Each of the five senses of smell, sight, sound, touch, and taste plays an important role in our perception of the world around us. These senses allow us to recognize a friend, feel a feather brush our skin, hear a leaf as it touches the ground, distinguish millions of different shades of color, and even distinguish over 10,000 different smells (Howard Hughes Medical Institute).

However, of these the sense of sight is the most important in our everyday lives. Of all of the information that we process in a typical day, 80% of that information comes in through our eyes. Further, humans use vision as the main means of monitoring their immediate environment (Vision1to1). For children, vision is the key element of learning during the first 12 years of life (Health Information.com).

Predictably, when asked which of our five senses is the most important, people will overwhelmingly list sight as the most important, followed by touch. In one Internet survey, 66% of people surveyed noted sight as the most important sense, 11% listed touch, 8% listed sound or taste, and only 4% listed smell is the most important sense (cited in Balaram).

Sight offers us the ability to take in information at a distance, thus providing a great advantage over the other senses. For example, when we taste something, we must physically touch the thing we taste. Similarly, to touch something we must have physical contact. Although it is true that both sounds and smells travel from a distance, we must still be relatively close in order to sense smells and sounds. In contrast, "our eyes can gather the most detailed information over the greatest distances of any of our measurable senses" (Vision1to1). We need only to gaze into the night sky and look at stars that are thousands of light years away to truly understand how our sense of sight lets us perceive distant objects.

In a practical sense, the ability to perceive objects by sight from a great distance can be greatly advantageous. In our evolutionary past, the sense of sight would allow us to visually perceive predators before they came within a dangerous distance. Similarly, the sense of sight would allow us to see animals that we were hunting, giving us a great advantage.

The human sense of sight is somewhat unique in the animal kingdom. As humans, we have effective full-color central vision that allows us to accurately perceive information in our immediate environment (Vision1to1).

While sense of sight maybe our most important sense when looked at in isolation, human perception is best when all senses are engaged. Importantly, "our brains think and learn best in three dimensions and when our other senses are somehow engaged" (Vision1to1). Similarly, it is important to note that we learn using all five senses. This is especially true of children, who incorporate all five senses to learn within and without the classroom (Health Information.com).