Humans have five senses, right? Well, not exactly. It’s a common belief that the only senses are sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. But scientists now know that we have so many more senses including:
- equilibrioception – the sense of balance, which keeps you from falling down
- thermoception – the sense of hot and cold
- proprioception – the sense of where your body parts relative to other body parts; this sense enables to touch your toes with your eyes closed
- nociception – the sense of pain
- chronoception – the sense of the time
Note that these are just senses that have names. There’s practically an infinite number of unnamed senses, including a sense of:
- hunger
- thirst
- exhaustion
- suffocation
- pressure
- danger
- morality
- intuition
Technical communicators have even more senses, 22 to be exact:
Senses related to basic informational elements:
- fontioception – the sense of the correct font to use
- titulioception – the sense of the correct heading to use
- blancioception – the sense of the correct use of white space
- graficioception – the sense of when to include an image in a document, and the formatting of that image
- referencioception – the sense of when and how to use a cross-reference
Senses related to major informational elements and sections:
- definitiocepetion – the sense of how to describe a concept, term, or idea
- laboriocepetion – the sense of how to document a task
- diagramioception – the sense of how to create a meaningful diagram
- glossariocepetion – the sense of the terms to include in a glossary
Senses related to the structure of a document:
- indicioception – the sense of what terms to index and how to correctly structure an index
- partitioception – the sense of how to break up a large block of text into separate sections, or a large document into sub-sections
- lexioception – the sense of what text to conditionalize
- recylioception – the sense of what text to reuse or single-source
- darwinioception – the sense of how to structure information using DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture XML language
Senses related to the reader:
- humanioception – the sense of the typical reader of the document
- intellengencioception – the sense of the reader’s intelligence
- curiosoception – the sense of how the reader will search for information
Senses related to general communication:
- practicaliocepetion – the sense of what is practical and meaningful information, and what is not
- presentioception – the sense of what information is current and up to date
- imperfectioception – the sense of information that is incomplete or inaccurate
- obfusicatiocepetion – the sense of a lack of clarity or meaning
- simplicitocepetion – the sense of simplicity in communication
The most important sense of all: clairitariocepetion – the sense of clear, effective communication
Andrew Brooke 
Awesome. Even if I tried, I wouldn't be able to come up with such creative ideas. Way to go!
Ha, very clever! Although I can't seem to read clairitariocepetion, let alone say it!
Good job.