This stinks. I mean it. It really smells. It's putrid. I can't stand it. It's disgusting.

Hey, it's Maria. And this is a special archived episode of a Kimbo.

What was the first sense? I mean, even if we just start with the mythological five senses, what was the first sense?

It was probably a combination of smell and touch. That the amoeba floating along the protozoa, all those weird little creatures, they collide with the outside world.

And they need to know what the outside world is telling them. They need to sense danger. They need to figure out what's food and what's not.

And so for millions of years, we've been evolving from that simple idea.

The turkey vulture really smells. Compared to every other bird in the animal kingdom, the turkey vulture has the best developed sense of smell.

Its olfactory region and its brain is many times bigger than that of any other birds.

A turkey vulture from 150 feet in the air can spot a dead chicken. Take that dead chicken, put a sheet over him, the turkey vulture can still find him from 100 feet away, simply by smelling.

It turns out that in addition to having a nose as we think of having a nose, the turkey vulture, like most creatures, also has Jacobson's organ.

Jacobson's organ is a little known sense, humans have it too, that's a pipeline directly from the outside world to our amygdala, right to the core of our brain.

It's where pheromones live. It turns out love at first sight is probably exaggerated, but love at first sniff is a real thing.

Jacobson's organ, which has been known for over 100 years, gives us proof that human beings, like turkey vultures, still make tons of their decisions based on things that don't have words associated with them that aren't based on long trains of logical, rational thought, but instead are built around how do we feel.

It turns out we don't have five senses. We have way more than that. The idea of a sixth sense leaves out a whole bunch of things.

For example, a headache, which sense is that, or the sense that your stomach is empty?

Turns out the people can sense when their blood pressure is high or low. We have proprioception, our ability to understand in a dark room, the relationship of our limbs to one another.

By many counts, there are more than 20 senses that most human beings engage with every day.

But if we look at the work of people who seek to engage with our culture, we spend almost all our time on the last sense, the sense that came along at the end.

The sense of words were copyrighters. We're trying to put together a narrative. We're looking for proof.

At universities, you get graded based on the papers that you hand in.

26 characters in millions of combinations, describing to others, proving to others that you are right.

And the sense that we are appealing to, the eye has to look at the words, the words have to be decoded, the words have to be understood, the words have to be processed, and then we make a decision.

...