Playful new exhibition “Our Senses: Creating Your Reality” opens at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science on April 12

DENVER — When it comes to our senses, hasn’t the number five had enough time in the spotlight? Now other sensory heroes get some overdue attention in “Our Senses: Creating Your Reality,” an exhibition for the whole family where you play with color, patterns, sounds, scents, and textures to discover there’s so much more to human senses than just the famous five. It opens at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science on April 12 and is free with general admission.

Every sight, sound, smell, taste and touch is detected by specialized sense systems that send signals through the nervous system to the brain. Your brain decodes and integrates the signals and converts them into perceptions and how you experience reality. Beyond the primary five, scientists are learning more and more about how our internal senses monitor the body and send messages to the brain about balance, hunger, thirst, body temperature, breathing and more.

This isn’t a journey for the faint of thought, so hold on to your brain, eyes, ears, nose and body because it’s going to be wild ride as you realize how what you perceive is not exactly what’s actually going on around you.

• Watch walls lit with alternating colored lights and see just how much a world bathed in white light differs from one illuminated in blue, green or red.
• Hunt like a snake and find prey using an infrared viewer.
• Dial into a variety of animal sounds normally outside the range of our hearing.
• Track distinct sounds in an audio collage, such as a creature in a natural setting or a single instrument in an orchestra.
• Try a balancing act as your feet feel flat but your eyes see walls that appear to curve and ripple.
• Explore a garden through the eyes of a bee or a butterfly.
• Test your complicated touch system and figure out how you sense hot or cold.
• Sniff out fragrance notes in a complex scent. What we perceive as a particular odor is actually a symphony of smells.
• Participate in a live show that explores how your senses work to create your reality.

The exhibition will be open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through August 4. For more information, visit dmns.org/senses.

“Our Senses” is organized by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, (amnh.org).