What a google search revealed a nard to be Starting on Valentine’s Day, we started reading The Aroma of Righteousness by Deborah Green, explores the imagery of fragrance in rabbinic literature. Two months later, we had Dr. Rachel Herz from Brown give a lecture on her work unraveling the neural processes of olfaction and gustation. The readings and lecture gave the class a well-rounded understanding at how scent is employed in ritual for invoking emotion. As mentioned earlier, our sense of smell is the most memorable due to its proximity to the pre-frontal cortex. Although research behind this phenomenon is relatively recent, practitioners of religion understand the influence of associating scents with divine concepts. In her introduction, Green mentions how we lack a vocabulary to describe our sense of smell, and refer to such using simile, metaphor or simply naming the scent. The explanation for such is that the olfactory bulb is located so “far down” that the circuitry co...
I’m finding the 6th sense to be very difficult to write about as there isn't a strong definition of what it is. Also, many people view it differently or have different ideas of what it can mean or do. But it’s such an interesting concept as its been defined by people as a sense of intuitive power or knowing what may happen in the future. But I find that definition to be confusing as it doesn’t give us anything real or tangible to connect too. The reading for this week by David Abrams, Jeffrey Kripal, Jon Kabat-Zinn tried to explain it, but I still found it rather difficult to comprehend. Other sense such as the classic five senses are very easy to understand, and we learn what they are at a young age. But there are other senses too such as balance, synesthesia, spatial awareness, temperature awareness and pain which are a bit more complex understanding the basics still isn’t too difficult.
I agree that reading about the 6th sense was very confusing. I think there are multiple definitions for the 6th sense, that trying to explain it coherently so everyone can understand is almost impossible. But we try, because we constantly want to know why something happens the way it does.
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