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Rodolfo Llinas Ph.D., writes:

Until recently, most people believed the nervous system's role was simply to gather information about the outside world. But many scientists now think there's more to it than that.

The model now in vogue is one of a nervous system that has evolved to sense the here and now for the purpose of simulating the future.

By accurately predicting what's about to happen, an animal is better able to survive. "Prediction is the ultimate and most pervasive of all brain functions," says Llinas. To back up his argument, he points to the predictive powers of the remote senses for detecting predators.

Vision, hearing, and odor detection, as predictors, are superior to touch and taste because they can function at a distance, buying more time for a creature to take action. "It is nice to be able to see that a threat is coming," he writes, "as opposed to having to feel it through one's outer being first, or perhaps to have to taste it, in order to register belatedly its arrival."

Llinas calls the senses "conduits from the external world to the internal world of the brain." They detect what he terms "universals," fundamental properties of Earth's environment that affect the survival of every creature.

The first and most important of these universals, according to Llinas, were light, heat, and gravity. It was (and still is) imperative that every animal on the planet, from microorganisms to whales, have knowledge of these properties, and so the first senses were created to detect them.

Further down the evolutionary pike, additional senses were developed to measure and monitor other properties like sound, odor, and texture.

Photo receptors—primitive eyes—told a creature where to go to find the shelter of shadows, for those who remained in the light were often eaten. Think of cockroaches scurrying instantly into the dark recesses of a kitchen when the lights are switched on.

Temperature-sensing cells on the skin provided information about whether an environment was too warm or too cold. And the other ancient sensor was the one that detected Earth's gravitational force, enabling a creature to know up from down and where it was in space. This is the origin of the human vestibular system.

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