Speech, Stories, and Telephone

    The sixth sense is controversial and hard to describe. I am intrigued by the idea that the sixth sense could have many possible meanings or could be multiple senses at once. After reading JBK’s post about whether or not speech and imagination are sixth senses, that got me thinking about both of those concepts. In my mind, it makes sense for speech and imagination to be sixth senses, at least in some ways. Speech is interesting to me because it involves hearing and touch (hearing oneself and feeling our mouths move as we speak), yet it is distinct from those two senses as well, particularly because speech involves creating output and with our traditional five senses, we tend to interpret sensory input. Imagination is a bit different because it seems like such an internal process, one where we individually use our brains, memories, and experiences to create something new. I see speech and imagination as being related, though, because they both create new, sensory outputs in a way.

    When Jeffrey Kripal says, in Authors of the Impossible, “Writing and reading, that is, can replicate and realize paranormal processes, just as paranormal processes can replicate and realize textual processes” (26), I think he is making a connection to speech and words as a sixth sense that can help contextualize experiences. It’s almost like a feedback loop or a cycle, where writing and reading help describe paranormal experiences and in turn, those paranormal experiences also help create writings about what happened. This idea is really interesting to me because I think it begins to explain more about how we create and contextualize stories of the supernatural or paranormal and how those stories are replicated over and over, throughout time. I think of it like a giant game of telephone; stories get passed on and repeated to many people over time and this can result in variations, inconsistencies, and even completely inaccurate/different descriptions than the original story.