To decide which sense to give up, the easiest method seems to be to go through process of elimination. I feel like the most important sense is vision, so that is immediately removed from consideration. It’s a little obvious that knowing where you are relative to other things is pretty important. Hearing is also important, as not only does it act as warning signs and feedback from the environment, but it is also vital for easy communication with others. Touch and feeling can be the difference between realizing something bad is happening to your body, and having no idea that you are about to be, or have been, severely injured. It’s also nice to have some sensation to your body. That leaves smell and taste. As we all know from when we have a cold, taste becomes nearly useless when our sense of smell is handicapped. Thus, if we were to eliminate our smell, we would effectively be removing our taste with it as well. So, that brings me to the decision of giving up taste. One may argue that taste is important for ensuring that we don’t consume toxic or poisonous substances. Although that is a valid statement, there are two points that make it less important. First, we’re no longer living in ancient times when we need to go hunting for our own food. We’re not going to randomly go out into the woods and find potentially dangerous berries, when instead we can just go to the fruit section of our local supermarket. Second, if we were to ever encounter harmful foods, our sense of smell would be able to alert us to a potential problem. Our nasal passage and our mouths are connected, so we would be able to smell the food in our mouths. Remember, even though we’re going to lose the luxury of tasting delicious foods, we’re being forced to eliminate one of our senses. Thus, we’re going to lose something anyway, so we want to minimize our losses, and mitigate potential effects on our future survival and comfort. In return, we get to be super-sensitive in one sense, for which I pick vision. I’ve had poor vision for a majority of my life, so I think it would be nice to have incredible vision. Some of the things I would hope comes with super sensitivity is increased clarity, improved rate of focal depth adjustment, greater range of peripheral vision, night vision, and maybe even x-ray vision and the ability to shoot lasers from my eyes. If my choice was not limited to the five basic senses and I was able to be a bit clever, I would pick super sensitivity in my common sense, or mental sensibility in general. That way, I would be able to look at a particular situation and pick up subtle clues that I might normally miss, in order to better analyze what’s going on. Although it’s not as exciting as having night vision or shooting lasers from my eyes, I feel it would be the most realistically useful in terms of everyday life. But, bringing this back full circle, if I wasn’t forced to do this and was instead offered a choice, I would probably decline. I would prefer to keep my taste over having super vision.If you were forced to give up one sense, but gain super-sensitivity in another, which senses would you choose?
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/daily-prompt-sensitive/