After hurting your head you may find that your sense have been affected. Your senses are:

• Sight
• Hearing
• Taste
• Touch
• Smell

It all depends on which part of your brain was injured. The brain diagram will show you which part of the brain controls which sense.

Click here to see the brain diagram

If you have problems with your senses now, it doesn’t mean to say you always will. There can be an improvement over time but you must be very patient.

Sight or seeing
Hurting the occipital lobe and the parietal lobe can change the way we see things. Although the eyes are working properly and can ‘see’ things, the occipital lobe has trouble recognising what the eyes are looking at. It is almost as if the brain is watching television where the picture is fuzzy or unclear.

Hearing or listening
Hurting the temporal lobe and the parietal lobe can change the way we hear things. The ears are working properly but the brain cannot recognise what you are listening to. It can be hard to concentrate on someone speaking and you might not understand them. Music may give you a headache or you may find the noise all around you very distracting. This is called ‘receptive dysphasia’.

Taste and smell
Taste and smell work together. If you have trouble smelling you have trouble tasting too! This is why you can’t taste things when you have a cold. Hurting the inside of the brain can affect the way you taste things. There is nothing wrong with the tongue but your brain is having trouble telling how things taste. Maybe your favourite food ‘tastes funny’ or you don’t like what you used to. You may even like food that you didn’t like before!

Touch
The parietal lobe is very busy as it receives messages from all of your senses including your sense of touch. Damaging this part of the brain can sometimes change how we feel things through touch. Maybe you can't feel your hand or arm or maybe you have trouble picking things up or feeling where things are and what they feel like. 

Sometimes people refer to other things that they call senses. These are not the same as your five senses. By this they mean your ability to do something. You might hear people talk about your ‘sense of balance and co-ordination’ or ‘sense of inhibition’. You can read more about these in the next few sections.