We have five senses: touching, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting. Perhaps we ought to add more generally feeling, movement perception, body perception. To these the proposal is that we should add, or recognise, another sense: braining.

Most of our senses are directed towards the external world: seeing objects and movement around us, hearing sounds created by pressure changes travelling through the air, smelling fine dispersals of scent, of materials that can react biochemically with our noses, tasting materials that react with receptors on our tongues, touching objects external to us. Some of the other less recognised senses are concerned with perceiving states of our bodies: perceiving pain, being aware of changes in muscles and joints, perhaps even hunger or thirst as senses perceiving biochemical imbalances. So one might say that there are the well-recognised external senses and the less well-recognised internal senses.

The important new internal sense, braining, is a sense whose object is the brain, its states, its dynamics, its locations, its operation generally. This is not thinking (which could perhaps also be classified as a sense) but brain-operation at a profounder level than thinking, feeling or emotion. The steps leading to recognition of braining as a new or additional sense start from what William James described as ideomotor activity: the perception of movements and directions within the brain associated with and prior to action. Also within the scope of braining one might include mental imagery generally, including imagery of hearing, vision, action, or even of tasting, smelling or touching.

Braining goes much further than this: its object is to become aware of the brain in the course of its activity, to observe what is taking place in the brain when we see, hear, touch, smell, taste, move, to observe the brain processes of attention, choice, decision, memory, to watch how speech emerges from brain state, to mark the progress of anticipation or planning. Once this would have been described or simply dismissed as introspection. But braining as a new sense is concerned with making a link between systematic introspection and neurological research. Braining is based on the proposition that we can perceive our brain as it functions. One of the handicaps of neurological research so far has been that whilst researchers can directly study brain changes in cats, monkeys, rats etc. the scope for direct observation of brain changes in humans is limited by ethical considerations, except when intervention is justified by treatment of brain lesions, epileptic foci or other brain pathology. If now we come to recognise that there is real scope for observation of our own brain functioning, then there can be a fruitful interaction between external brain research (using MRI MEG PET etc) and internal brain research by recognising, practising and developing 'braining' as an instrument.

How can the idea of 'braining' be changed from the theoretical to the practical? How can we develop 'braining' as a real new sense? A blind man, a man blinded, by a redirection of attention improves the sharpness and utility of his senses other than vision; he becomes able to extract more useful perception, more meaning relevant for action, from hearing or perhaps from other senses. This suggests that to develop the 'braining' sense we need to become able to suppress, temporarily, information being presented to us by our other senses, and particularly by external vision, and to redirect attention to the brain, as it functions.

We also need to examine which experiences might be categorised as part of 'braining'. There is a small collection which might include ideomotor action of the kind described by William James, the mental rotation of objects research, mental representation of other sense experience: music, pictures, smells, tastes, the process of transfer of motor patterning e.g. from articulation to gesture or gesture to articulation, possibly the emotional and action responses to particular perceived bodily patterns, the relation between emotions and bodily states (the James/Lange theory of the emotions), the location within the head of reference points for different classes of language, Penfield and Ojemann's observations of the relation between points of electrical stimulation of the cortex and the patient's response, dichotic hearing research of Bekesy and others, Bechtereva's research, counting and star concentration techniques, word-repetition techniques, possibly Yogic practices and perceptions. Some of these may not be properly classified as part of braining but examination of each of them may help to arrive at a sharper conception of 'braining'.

Beyond this initial research, there is of course the basic question of how aspects of braining are represented as neural patterning and even more fundamentally how the neural patterning is generated in development from the embryo to the adult human brain. A recent and remarkable book by Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species 1997, presents an illuminating and persuasive account of the way in which, by a process analogous to Darwinian evolution, the developing brain adapts itself to the body in which it is placed. The pattern of neural connections is determined, largely, not by instructions in the DNA of the genome but by a self-organising process involving the selective survival or death of neurons competing for connection to peripheral structures.