If you had to lose one of the five senses, which would you pick?

[Mistral]

Tough, tough...sight and sound are the primary forms of input, and taste and smell are inextricably linked, and touch is the primary thing that keeps us alive (just look at the mortality rate among people who are born without the ability to feel pain). Taste would probably be my selection, since sight, sound and touch are most important, and taste is worthless without smell, anyways.

[Xaenn]

Taste would still have some value without smell. However, by forfeiting smell you can get rid of annoyances like driving by a farm.

I think a more interesting question would be between sight, sound, and touch. Of those five senses those are clearly the three most important. One could do fine without smell or taste.

[Jase]

I would lose touch, then i would be the worlds best porn star!!!

[Evans]

Taste relies alot on your sense of smell, so if you lose your smell most things will taste some what bland.

That is why I would chose taste. That way I only lose one sense not two.

There you go.

[dkzerov]

Smell. I keep catching flu anyway....
Smelling tasty food and not being able to taste it suck.

[shamess]

Smell probably, only be default though, because I want to keep all my others.

Plus, don't we have like a tonne of other senses? Like vertego and others I can't remember.

[thkvl]

I would prefer to keep all of my senses, but if I really had to choose one, I would definitely choose taste. I don't want to be blind or deaf, and losing touch would make it seem that my entire body would be numb, so that's gone. That leaves smell and taste, and since if you lose smell, in essence, you also lose taste, so might as well choose the lesser of two evils as they say.

[Dingy]

Surprising how many people said touch, considering most sexual arousal and activity relies on physical touch. Anyway, good to know sex isn't a primal need

For me, I think, it'd be sight. The reason being mostly because I can base my perceptions of things/objects/humans/animals on the other senses, my aural, oral, sensory and nasal senses. And that would mean tuning into the more finer details of said things/beings and it would also allow me to picture things how I want in my head and thus, greater use of creativity and imagination, of course this would lead me to opine that all reality is mere perception, but at least, if I'm blind I won't have to conform to what the world thinks is reality.
I think the only undesirable character of blindness would be dependence. I am not saying being able to live alone is possible, for I don't believe so, I'm merely saying that I wouldn't want to rely on someone to do what I can do on my own, and not to undermine the importance of sight, but I think I would be happier being blind rather than lacking my other senses.

[Mistral]

Shamess, technically so (sense of balance, sense of direction, sense of time, sense of supernatural - sixth sense), but those are the traditional five, and the only ones that actually are relayed information from the outside world to the brain (balance being a fluid-based system borrowing the inner ear to let us stand, direction and time being the ability for the brain to keep track of position in space-time without external stimuli) and are confirmed to exist (ESPer abilities haven't been confirmed by any reputable, valid experiments - all "confirming experiments" have been rigged in some way).

[Skinner8]

I love my sight, hearing and touch... I think taste, it's probably the least useful to me. I know of more things that smell really great than taste really great, anyway.

[Dingy]

Shamess, technically so (sense of balance, sense of direction, sense of time, sense of supernatural - sixth sense), but those are the traditional five, and the only ones that actually are relayed information from the outside world to the brain (balance being a fluid-based system borrowing the inner ear to let us stand, direction and time being the ability for the brain to keep track of position in space-time without external stimuli) and are confirmed to exist (ESPer abilities haven't been confirmed by any reputable, valid experiments - all "confirming experiments" have been rigged in some way).

Those that you speak of actually, are Equilibrioception (vestibular) and Proprioception (kinesthetic). Actually, touch isn't even considered a 'special' sense by most scientists., rather a somatic sense. And otherwise, if one were to follow a Western classification of senses, then there are seven- visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, cutaneous, kinesthetic, vestibular and organic. Not taking into account ESP. And there are actually somewhere b/w 9-21 human senses The classical five senses classification is Aristotle's and since then there has been considerable research on the same.

I love my sight, hearing and touch... I think taste, it's probably the least useful to me. I know of more things that smell really great than taste really great, anyway.

Actually, both your oral and olfactory senses are quite connected seeing as how they are both detected by chemoreceptors. Ever put nose (or even eye) drops and tasted them? And like Zephyr's already pointed out, taste is useless w/o smell, so not an unwise choice.

[ZeikHunter]

in order of preference:
taste/smell
sight
touch
hearing

i seem to have better spatial awareness than most other people, so i can deal with being blind. taste is trivial. i dont get much of a chance to taste my food anyway, and since smell is closely linked, i guess thatd go too, but id rather be blind than lose my sense of smell.

[BiggySmall]

This may sound crazy but Ill get rid of sight because if you get rid of that your other senses can get sharper.

[Winged 2.0]

This may sound crazy but Ill get rid of sight because if you get rid of that your other senses can get sharper.

Think long and hard about that.

Taste for me, as stated earlier.

*Winged 2.0 takes a bite of pizza.

Yep.

[Ultimate X]

definatly smell since almost everything smells like shit