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Comment by ebg13 | Hacker News Reader

What a weird article. Humans can also detect heat. So is this is just about how some animals are more sensitive than others? Because I'm 100% certain that nobody in history has ever said "dog noses don't feel temperature".

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It's not merely sensing heat, but sensing weakly radiating heat from a distance. The human researchers could only distinguish the test and control objects by touching them.

Did you actually read the article?

All the article says is that the nose of dogs is much more sensitive to heat than other animals, calling it a "new sense" is an exaggeration.

Humans also sense radiative heat from a distance. The only difference explicitly stated in the article is degree of sensitivity not a new sense.

But it can be a nuisance.

I think degree of sensitivity, discrimination, or directionality can warrant counting a 'new sense'. I would consider my sense of thermoreception to be different from that of a snake's heat-pits, or hearing to be a different sense from feeling vibrations.

As the article about epistemology posted yesterday mentioned, at some point, a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.

This confused me as well. I didn't see anything in the article that distinguishes between the surface temperature of the nose being raised specifically via (a) infrared light vs. (b) some other source conductive heat transfer.

I'm not super familiar with mammal physiology, but I would think (a) counts as a new sense category, whereas (b) counts as a just a new understanding of how sensitive the nose is.

> I'm not super familiar with mammal physiology, but I would think (a) counts as a new sense category

> the surface temperature of the nose being raised specifically via (a) infrared light

If you've ever felt the sun on your skin, you've sensed heat from electromagnetic radiation.

If you've ever been in front of an infrared lamp or heater, you've sensed heat from infrared light in specific.

How would that be a new sense category?

Some are better than others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_sensing_in_snakes

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