Facial vision and other subtle senses

I was speaking with a blind man recently, who told me of facial vision -- the ability to sense an object's location without direct visual feedback. He can do this, as can many blind people. In looking it up, I found that in 1986 the phenomenon was doubted, but a more recent source presents it as fact. Apparently it has to do with hearing; the blind man mentioned a study showing that it goes away in blind people when their ears are blocked (I couldn't find a link to this).

I have noted facial vision in myself also, although I am a sighted person. If I enter a pitch black room or cave, I can still have a sense of how large the space is-- it just feels big or small.

This reminds me of a subject I have noted many times: Sensory perception is incredibly subtle, diverse, and overlapping, far more so than is generally admitted in the sciences (neuroscience, psychology, biophysics, medicine). The phenomenon of touch, for instance, includes not only perception of things like pain, pressure, heat, and cold, but also perception of proximity, location relative to gravity, internal flows and movements, weight, contraction, expansion, and tension. Vision includes this elusive facial vision (or perhaps it might be mixed phenomenon of touch and hearing). Hearing includes a component of touch -- don't some sounds tickle a bit, or grate, or give a good punch?

This is not your imagination. This is not some flaky, fluffy thing that your mind is inventing, which can never be measured "scientifically." It is real, and the reason the language seems vague and unscientific is that sensory perception is a deep, nonverbal phenomenon. Words are always clumsy in this case. Because scientists rely on precision, they have imposed strict categories (five senses) that are supposed to be independent and nonoverlapping.

But the reality is not like that. I am coming to see more and more ways that our scientific descriptions are impositions and not reflections of reality. And that's OK.