Two students of the senses win the Nobel prize for medicine

THE IDEA that there are five senses goes back at least as far as Aristotle. But it is not quite true. Four of the senses are obvious, not least because each is associated with a particular organ: sight with the eyes, hearing with the ears, taste with the tongue and smell with the nose. But the fifth classical sense, touch, is distributed over the whole surface of the body, albeit that it is particularly concentrated in the fingertips. Touch, moreover, is only one of such distributed senses. Others, perceived consciously, include pain, heat and cold. And modern science has shown there are yet further, unconsciously perceived senses, known collectively as proprioception. These keep track of the position and movement of the body and its parts. This year, the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, which awards the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine, chose to honour the discoverers of the molecular mechanisms of two of these distributed senses—temperature and mechanical stimulation.