sense

(sens)

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[L. sensus, a feeling]

1. To perceive through a sense organ.
2. The general faculty by which conditions outside or inside the body are perceived. The most important of the senses are sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and pressure, temperature, weight, resistance and tension (muscle sense), pain, position, proprioception, visceral and sexual sensations, equilibrium, and hunger and thirst.
3. Any special faculty of sensation connected with a particular organ.
4. Normal power of understanding.
5. The ability of an artificial pacemaker to detect an electrically conducted signal produced by the heart, such as a P wave or QRS complex.
6. In nucleic acid chemistry, the strand of DNA whose nucleotide order codes for messenger RNA.

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