If we lost all of our senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell) would we be able to funtion?

Question

I always wondered what might happen if we lost all of our senses...would we be literally nothing?

Answer 1

Well... you would be hard-pressed to eliminate ALL the senses that a person has. We all know about sight, smell, and so on, but there are actually dozens of other senses that are present, but just not as obvious.

Kinesthetic sense is a good example. You know where your body is by how it feels. It's hard to even imagine someone moving your arm and you NOT knowing where it is (there are a very few people with a rare disorder and lose this sense - they can't walk without looking at their feet!). There's also a variety of biochemical senses that let you know about how much blood sugar you have and so on.

But even so, it's been demonstrated that even low-level sensory deprivation over long periods of time is little less than torture. Even an hour in a sensory-deprivation tank is enough to get most people to start hallucinating. Lasting anxiety, depression, and anti-social behaviour has also been linked with it.

All of which suggests that you don't cease to be without senses... but without a link to the external world, it's easy to go a bit wacky.

Answer 2

We would be alone with our thoughts we had before we lost our senses, until we would go crazy.
All of our survival mechanisms (the need to eat, the ability to eat, drink, nurse our wounds, get warm, get cool, etc) are totally dependent on the outside stimuli we perceive.

I think there is a book about that somewhere..... a soldier who was wounded and lost all his senses, and was brought into a hospital and essentially left for dead and kept in an basement room....alone with his thoughts.

Answer 3

you got to have a least one of these 3: sight, hearing or touch. helen keller was blind and deaf from age 1 but learned to communicate by sign language by her teacher signing in her palms. i used to work at a facility for profoundly impaired people and those who had no senses were vegetables, technicians had to do everything for them and they gave no response. very sad and probably terribly boring and lonely for the patient if they had the mental ability to realize their surroundings (mercifully they didn't)

Answer 4

Helen Keller comes to mind for the most part....

If your blind, mute, deaf and in a forest with a tree falling on your foot. Will you make a noise?

Answer 5

If I had to opt for one to lose, it should be scent. I mean, you dont truly want it for some thing that important precise? and then if i ought to in elementary words keep one it should be sight. it ought to suck no longer having listening to or some thing like that, yet i ought to a lot extremely to be in a position to make certain issues and folk than listen them.

Answer 6

i would wonder if i would want to live ..i am as perplexed as you are at such a thought ..how horrible ...your punishment for such a thought is to drink 2 gallons of water strate down and hold it for one half hour

Answer 7

i guess