What You’ll Discover
- There is a blind spot in each eye where no light-detecting cells exist, and the brain fills it in without being asked - a process that has been running invisibly their whole life.
- Scientists have identified at least nine human senses, including balance, temperature, pain, and the sense of where your limbs are without looking - the 'five senses' count goes back to Aristotle alone.
- The tongue map - sweet at the front, bitter at the back - came from a mistranslated German study and was printed in textbooks for decades without being corrected. Every taste bud can sense all five tastes.
- The story that carrots give you super night vision was wartime propaganda invented to hide the fact that British forces were using radar.
- The Jahai people of the Malay Peninsula have precise single words for specific smells, the same way English has single words for colours - and a researcher found Jahai speakers can name a smell as quickly as an English speaker names a colour.
In this episode of The Brain Bus: Brain Busters - made for curious 8 to 10-year-olds - your child discovers that their brain has been hiding a hole in their vision their entire life, that the tongue map taught in classrooms is based on a mistranslated study, and that what we call "the five senses" was a list made by one philosopher over two thousand years ago that science has since well and truly outgrown. Episodes run approximately 20 minutes - ideal for a mid-drive stretch. Nova and Cosmo guide kids through a genuine rethink of how senses work - from the blind spot the brain quietly fills in, to the reason smell pulls up memories faster than almost anything else. As a kids science podcast for ages 8-10, Brain Busters treats children as real thinkers: Cosmo confidently defends the tongue map and the carrot night-vision myth, and kids get to watch both ideas get unpacked with the evidence behind them. A built-in Sound Detective road challenge turns the car itself into a listening lab, and the wondering question - why does the brain filter out most sounds without telling you? - is genuinely worth talking about long after the episode ends. Whether you're after a family trivia podcast for a road trip or something that holds a ten-year-old's attention without a screen, this episode earns its keep.
Chapters
Tap any chapter to jump straight to that part of the episode.