Access the Full Power of Your Mind by Understanding the Five Internal Senses

With a little help from Ibn Sina

When we talk about the five senses, we’re usually thinking about taste, touch, smell, hearing and sight.

But the 10th-century Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina thought there was more to our senses than this.

With his version of rationalist empiricism, he wanted to categorise the human experience more accurately, and above all, understand all the ways that humans acquire knowledge.

Viewing the world through the lens of the traditional five senses is quite a limiting approach to knowledge-gathering.

We think that learning must be experience-based — the interpreting of a stimulus through one of these senses — we hear information told to us, we see (read) information on the page, we touch the hot pan and know not to go back and touch the bastard again.

But for Ibn Sina, this is not the full picture. If we truly want to place ourselves in the best possible state for learning (and let’s face it, we all want that), we must also pay attention to, and develop, what he calls our five internal senses.

This was an early attempt at what we would now recognise as applied psychology with a dash of philosophy of mind for good…