Seeing with our eyes closed. When we did our presentation on the sixth sense we showed the video trying to have us see a ghost. What was interesting about this video to me though is the whole time we had our eyes closed, we were supposed to SEE with our eyes closed how on earth can that possibly work? Apparently it does, not in that particular instance, but there are people who are capable to such tasks, more than us just feeling a possible presence in the room. I am thinking particularly of bling people, who are able to "see" using sonar. I saw a video a few years back about people who can use clicking noises in order to navigate themselves around the world. Some people are able to even paint complex pictures of what rooms look like just using their sonar abilities. This makes me think about how much more we actually see in a particular day. As we've discussed our brains are constantly filtering things out in order for us to get our perception of any particular moment. The fact that people can pick up abilities such as sonar, makes me think of what some people may actually be capable of seeing or doing. Especially with the loss of any one of our major 5 senses.
Naming Scents: The Ambiguous Nature of Describing Smell
It is really difficult to name smells without just saying the thing that produces a smell. We don’t really have words for smells specifically. A floral scent is called that because it smells like flowers, “floral” is not its own word specifically for the scent. This becomes especially apparent when reading the names of candles and perfumes. For example, I own a perfume named “Velvet Moon”. That name has nothing to do with what it smells like, and yet I personally think it is aptly named. The perfume smells like cardamom, mahogany, beeswax, and black pepper. Is that what the moon or velvet smells like? Almost certainly not. But the words used to describe the scent have given me the association between those scents, velvet, and the moon. This is also true when the name of a scent doesn’t match what mid tells you something should smell like. There is a Yankee candle called “By the Pool” that is amber and coconut scented. That notably is not what pools smell like, so while the scent itself...
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