How does a person's senses identify the properties of a material

Touch can sense the texture, and you can see what color it is, but if your talking about chemical properties, I'd say smell, color, and heat can identify some chemicals.

The  grandmother cell  is a hypothetical  neuronthat represents a complex but specific concept or object.[1]  it activates when a person "sees, hears, or otherwise sensibly discriminates"[2]  a specific entity, such as his or her grandmother. the term was in use at least as early as 1966 amongst staff and students in the department of experimental psychology, university of cambridge, england. a similar concept, that of the  gnostic neuron, was proposed two years later