Smells and Bells

Hearing               If there was something I could not live without is my hearing. I could not imagine watching a movie with only closed caption to guide me through the character’s life, hitting the play button on my favorite Spotify playlist and have nothing but the vibrations to grasp upon, or even being asleep in my bed and not be able to wake up to the artificial bird noises that I have programmed my phone to emit at certain hours of the morning. How could I even understand how life would be without sounds like: the shuffling of cards, a vacuum picking up a bunch of crumbs, and my very favorite. The tone that a GameCube makes when you first turn it on.               I can honestly say that I admire people that live on without their hearing. There is no way that I could be satisfied with my life deprived of the life’s beautiful miracle of sounds an...

Sight               Humans, in their present state, have three color receptors which means that we can see an approximate of 7,000,000 colors. This might sound like an impressive number, I mean we can literally see more colors than we can imagine. But, let’s put this into perspective; butterflies, among with some other insects have four color receptors adding the capability to see UV regions of the color spectrum. Now that sounds amazing, adding one more receptor to our repertoire can open a whole new world of opportunities. If you think that is remarkable let me tell you about a different animal. An aquatic crustacean that lives in the deepest parts of the sea. The Mantis Shrimp. This little fellow has not 3, not 4, not 6, not 10, but 16 color receptors. This means that the Mantis Shrimp is capable to see over 4 times the amount of colors we see. Scientist don’t even understand how their eyes work as they can see color...

“To have an opinion, one must overlook something.” The excerpt we read from The Authors of the Impossible and its discussion of the powers gained by an individual free from the constraints of an ego reminded me, of course, of ghosts and the paranormal. Because humans have physical bodies, we have developed a concept of the “self.” The ego gives us this sense of distinction between ourselves and the world around us. There can be physical bodies without an ego, there can be individuals without bodies or egos, but there cannot be egos without bodies. If there is nothing physical to separate the self from the outside, how can there be an ego? I am aware that very few of Freud’s ideas about the id, ego, and superego are taken seriously anymore, but allow me to indulge myself for just a moment. Some people have overly strong egos, which can make them close-mined or lacking in empathy. The self is all that exists. Others can have no ego, which gives them the “’impossible’ powers” describe...

“Out of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful” – Helen Keller Our vision presentation group did a great job describing sight. To recap how our vision works -- visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment using light in the visible spectrum reflected by the objected the environment. While Helen Keller is quoted to have saying that the sense of sight must be the most wonderful of the senses, I personally believe it’s the most instrumental sense in our day-to-day life. Sight allows humans and animals to move around freely, to be able to look for danger or resources, and allows us to read the faces and body languages of those in their community. Our sight lets us create spatial awareness, lets us digest lots of information very quickly through reading, and allows us humans to store massive amounts of content. Without sight we would have learned but a fraction about our universe. Without microscopes we may have never discovered atoms an...

The taste presentation was a strange and wonderful experience for me. As someone who has never tried miracle berries before, it was pretty mind blowing. I did some research after class about the miracle berries because I didn’t understand how they fully worked. Below I’ve pasted an excerpt from “HowStuffWorks”. “In 1968, scientists isolated the active protein responsible for making things taste sweet. Because of its miraculous way of making things taste so good, the protein was dubbed miraculin. When miracle fruit is consumed, the miraculin in the berry binds to the taste buds on the tongue. A person has receptors on their taste buds that identify sweet, sour, bitter and savory tastes. Normally, if you were to eat a lemon, your sour receptors would start firing…Under the influence of miraculin, however, the sweet receptors start signaling and suppress the sour tastes. The miraculin rewires the sweet receptors to temporarily identify acids as sugars.” Originally when I first...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Kurutob_eating_with_hands.jpg The presentation from the touch group today made me think about an element of my study abroad that I really enjoyed. In both Tanzania and India, a lot of the food that we ate we ate without utensils, just using our fingers. In Tanzania it was rice, ugali, beans, cooked cabbage, and some other food. And in India it was many of the traditional, well-known Indian dishes like dal, curry and masala. We ate these by just grabbing the food we wanted with our fingers, mixing it around if desired, and picking it up and eating it. Many Indian dishes are served with a tortilla that can be used to pick up food. It was a practice that took some time to get used to, but once I did I found that I really enjoyed it. For one, it was a good way to tell if the food was too hot to eat. But it also meant that we really were connecting with our food on a bit of a deeper level than the disconnect of using a fork or spoon....

At the beginning of the chapter “A Woman’s Touch,” Classen writes “Hot, dry, cold and moist. The same qualities thought to shape the cosmos in premodernity were also believed to shape the bodies of men and women” (71). This sentence reminded me of the theme song from one of my favorite cartoons as a kid: “Earth, fire, wind, water, heart, go planet!” While not the same kind of elements, in both cases the elements that make up the earth also make up people. In the show Captain Planet, five kids from different countries each represent one of the elements (earth, fire, wind, water, and “heart”) with a magical ring. They fight villains representing pollution and greed and other threats to the planet. They join their magic ring powers together to summon Captain Planet to help save the day.   The kids and their elemental rings aren’t the same as the hot, dry, cold, and moist qualities believed to shape all things including people, what’s the same is an identification with the earth, wit...

In the book The Deepest Sense, Classen writes that medieval Europeans believed strongly in the power of touch. The touch of a saint, according to their conception, could heal the sick. A witch’s touch could cause someone to become ill. While perhaps most of us no longer worry that a women who is sleeping with the devil is going to poison us, we certainly recognize the power of touch in new ways. The connection between health and touch has come up several times in this class now. After reading this most recent book, I can’t help but think back to A Natural History of the Senses, which recounted how important touch is in helping premature babies start to thrive. Apparently, a person doesn’t have to be a saint to heal someone with a touch; all they have to do is volunteer at a NICU. This is just one of the cases in which the sense of touch can help us heal.  The discussion of touch and animals in The Deepest Sense reminded of something I had read about how pets lower children’...

What should we see? What should we hold witness to?  "Since, in the Hindu understanding, the deity is present in the image, the visual apprehension of the image is charged with religious meaning. Beholding the image is an act of worship, and through the eyes one gains the blessings of the divine" (Eck, 3) After reading this quote, I started to think about the power of sight and what it means to see. According to Eck blessings are to be received through the eye; making the eye the orifice or connecting point in which the divine 'touches' a person. Te eye itself is an organ which depends on the brain's interpretations of the outside world. No matter the culture, a brain (normally) can see what is there - but can it feel what cannot be seen? Through the eye, the divine may be able to 'physically' touch, not the eye itself, but rather, the mind of the devout. Most know the phrase "eyes are the window to the soul" - so would the opening o...

This may be a bit of an unconventional blog post, but I wanted to share some thoughts I had after Elizabeth came to our class on Monday. First, I want to say that much of what Elizabeth shared with us, I agree with or relate to in some way. Meditation, communicating to the body and listening and learning from it, these are all things that I've been actively practicing for years and that I feel are very important for healing and health, both mentally and physically. I know that times when I've meditated and connected with my body has helped me relax, center myself, and understand what I need in the moment. All that being said, I found the class to be difficult, and this is something that I've experienced before. It started with the guided meditation, which is something that has always bothered me. As I said, I do think that meditation is important and can be beneficial. However, I've always struggled with guided meditations. I find that the experience of someone tell...

“Hindu thought is most distinctive for its refusal to make the one and the many into opposites. For most, the manyness of the divine is not superseded by oneness. Rather, the two are held simultaneously and are inextricably linked.” (Eck, pg. 28) The section of Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India was really interesting to me. Usually when you see something you take it as face value, instinctively categorizing it into whatever niche your brain thinks it fits. We divide animals, plants, objects, even other humans into often arbitrary categories when our vision goes unchecked. In such a sight-based religious practice, it would be easy to see how one could think of deities as unattached to each other, each having distinct and separate attributions mutually exclusive with others. However, in Hinduism, this difference does not mutually exclude oneness. When explaining away the visual distinctions we make between humans, whether it be due to race or gender or body shape or some other v...

"The Deepest Sense" by Constance Classen talks about in the Middle Ages when the sun set, everywhere - inside and outside - would be dark. People learned to place their furniture along the walls of the house in order to move around the room safely.  While I was studying abroad in Prague, Czech Republic I took an Intercultural Communication course. One of the excursions in the class was to a simulation where a group of us walked through a series of pitch black rooms pitch, so it was like we were blind. We were led through these rooms by listening to the voice of a blind man. We had to walk through a "kitchen" and find different appliances along with walking through a "park" and guessing what each of the statues were. None of us did very well, which is understandable because we aren't used to living a life in the dark. Our blind guide made it appear easy to walk through each of the rooms and "see" using his hands. For the blind, the se...

 Where you are born is probably the second biggest determining factor for what you'll be able to experience in your life. The first biggest is when you are born- and not the relatively local periods that happen repeatedly such as a month or star sign- but years, fortyears, centuries and millennia. A life nowadays is as different from one in the 19th century as a 19th century life was from a life in the classical era. This is something that we even see reflected in nature but at much grander time scales, for instance, we live in an era closer to when the Tyrannosaurus Rex did (67 million years ago) than the T-Rex to the stegosaurus (150 million years ago). And what have those terrible lizards done in the mean time? They live on in my backyard as poultry whose eggs I pirate. As the marches of time and technological progress heightens their paces, this effect- the mutations of forms, be they organic or ideological- only becomes more drastic. But the connectedness of technology i...

As we read these accounts of how different religious traditions and experiences are enhanced through certain senses, I’m reminded that each of these sensory avenues alone is not enough for a complete understanding of a religious experience. I find myself thinking, what is Islam like for a deaf person in Indonesia? And now, what would it be like to be blind in India? I know none of these readings advocate for one sense to be used and considered over all the rest, but the more they talk about how important images and sight is for Hindus in India, the more I think about how exclusive it could be for people who are differently able. I am exceptionally attuned to issues having to do with seeing because my dad is nearly blind. I find myself reacting when I read things like “Not only is seeing a form of “touching,” it is a form of knowing” (9). I know this to be true through my dad’s experience. He can’t tell when someone across a room is trying to make eye contact with him, and he can’t ...

Last week, our Smells and Bells class had an auditory showcase, where a few students taught the class about the wonder of sound. They brought music instruments, crazy videos of wacky people sounding out the word “minimum”, and a harp player to showcase her talents. As someone who is not very well versed (ha) in anything music or sound oriented, much of the presentation was thought provoking and fascinating. Never had I thought of how the scale was first musically arranged.   I had assumed it was based off frequency or pitch, but never had I considered that the number of notes and octaves themselves are arbitrary. In other places around the world, they do not use the same 12 note-Western style that is mostly taught in most of Europe and America. In the Middle East, there are tempered scale systems dividing into 53 and in Southern India a scale split into 72 notes. Many other scales using different pitches exist as well – pentatonic, Hejaz scale, Saba scale (just to name a few). I...

http://house-of-larva.com/ Our senses are not infallible. They make mistakes all the time. What we see or hear or smell can be distorted or misinterpreted. We are gullible, believing almost anything if our senses tell us it is true. Often we are completely unaware of the mistakes they make. Drag is about illusion. It creates a space to explore and celebrate gender and sexuality in new and exciting ways. Many assume that the illusion is as simple as men dressed as women. They see humor in the “mistake” their senses make when they see someone in drag. However, there is an honesty in drag. Our senses are not making a mistake. In fact, drag may be the only way that we can authentically see gender for what it is: an illusion. Performance is always a part of gender. We are constantly putting on a show, expressing our gender in everything from how we talk to how we walk to how we dress and beyond. When we perceive another human being’s gender, we can only sense this performance. Our se...

Astral Projection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU3oAyin8W4

One theme that we've been talking about recently is the distortion and amplification of sound, first in relation to Quranic recitation, and as of yesterday, drag performance. With Quranic recitation and the call to prayer, the sound is amplified through the use of microphones and speakers, and distorted through the amplification, but also distorted as the sound mixes with the sounds of daily life: cars, horns, music, voices and more. In the workshop by House of Larva, we listened to the audio of some of their performance, as well as a guided meditation, in which the vocals that had been recorded were often greatly distorted, either by the person speaking, or through later audio editing on the computer. Something that I've been thinking about in regards to this is how this modification of voice could lead to a loss of understanding and accessibility to the listener. This comes from my personal experience of being hard of hearing. As a result of my hearing loss, sound over...