Smells and Bells

  Web Blog Sensory Interpretation Blog Prompt or 6? 5 senses... Welcome!  Here is the Web post  Assignment for our class, and general guidelines for what to include in your posts Sensory Interpretation Web Blog Posts  (6 posts on each of the senses, 5% each, plus one summarizing blog post the last week of class 10%, for a total of 40%).  Short reflection writing assignments to be posted on a blog set up specifically for this class  here . Students will "log" what they are learning about the relationship between the senses and "religious" experience throughout the term, and be able to comment on one another's questions and insights.  You should make at least 7 posts, @one every two weeks. Make sure you have one post each tagged with "taste", "smell", "hearing", "sight", "touch" or "6th sense."  To assure you will get credit for covering each of the six senses in your blog posts, edit them to make sure th...

Web Blog Sensory Interpretation Blog Prompt or 6? 5 senses... Sensory Interpretation Web Blog Posts  (6 posts on each of the senses, 5% each, plus one summarizing blog post the last week of class 10%, for a total of 40%).  Short reflection writing assignments to be posted on a blog set up specifically for this class  here . Students will "log" what they are learning about the relationship between the senses and "religious" experience throughout the term, and be able to comment on one another's questions and insights.  You should make at least 7 posts, @one every two weeks. Make sure you have one post each tagged with "taste", "smell", "hearing", "sight", "touch" or "6th sense."  To assure you will get credit for covering each of the six senses in your blog posts, edit them to make sure they have these tags.   Also among your 7 or more posts you should respond specifically to ...

Sometime in April, we discussed sight in Hinduism, specifically, darsan. Diane Eck’s book, Darsan, helped us understand the divine image in India, how sight embodies the holy experience.  Although I learned that we have the potential to smell infinite scents, 70% of our body’s sensory receptors are in our eyes. I think sight is so overwhelming that it acts as the bridge to connect all of our sensations together, to understand scent comes from objects and instruments produce sound. Being able to observe the world is the way we begin to understand.  It’s difficult to overstate the importance of sight in our everyday lives, I am able to type this reflection by seeing my words. How is sight used in ritual? I think sight is the primary sense used in orienting ourselves in a setting. You use your sight to determine what is reality and what is illusion. In this sense, it can be difficult in Western contexts to know when you’ve “found God” in a visual sense, as well as an emb...

"Intimate contact with animals was a part of daily life in the premodern world. Animals were everywhere" (Classen,93)  What has become of our connection to what and who is around us? Is out lose of connection to the animals and nature surrounding us play a role in our increase hostility and fading compassion as a society? How important are animals to human life? Beyond that of serving as food (for some). What have we lost as a people when we cut off connections to animals? Since when have animals become denigrated as lesser than humans? It's despairing that we live in a world where the only way we can connect with the natural world around us via animals has to be sanctioned - but the same cannot be said vice versa. Our regular contact with animals in the Western world is under control and defined by domestication and segregation. We eroticize the exoticism of species of foreign terrain but why must it suffer for our amusement? Is this all connected to our conne...

You know when you get the sort of strange feeling when you step into a friends house for the first time. You don't know where anything is, you're not quite sure how to go about doing anything, and the entire house smells weird. Not necessarily a bad smell. although that can happen, but it's as if you're surrounded by something your body has to get used to. It can take some time. Eventually, as you become better friends and you visit their house more and more often; you'll start the notice the smell less and less. It will become second nature for you to be in this house. You may not even remember that it used to smell so different to you, now you don't notice any difference from anywhere else in your life. Why is that? I know when people come to my house for the first time I have asked what they smell that's different than what they're used to. They mention that they can tell I have a dog. Does it smell bad like a dog? No, simply that there is an ani...

When I walked into class and saw the three guest speakers, I knew I made the right decision to get to class that day. The House of Larva is a drag show that is intended to engage all of the senses. In class we did a few things that were much more about touch and smell. However, my favorite part was the real show that evening. The dramatic costumes and images and lighting are what made the entire experience so memorable. The costume I remember the most was that of Anfanga Sphinx (my apologies if that is spelled wrong). The costume had no real organization to it but it immediately drew your attention. There was torn cloth, glitter, something that resembled flour, a marker, and cloth strategically stuck to cover the nipples. The look made a bold statement, which I am sure was the intention. A statement I'm sure it wasn't planning to make but did an excellent job of doing so was to the young men who were clearly out of their element at this show. They had a bit of trouble figur...

One of my Mother's favorite stories to tell people is that when I was little I was such a picky eater that I went through a phase that I would only eat white food. It's true, there was about a month of my life that I would refuse to eat anything that wasn't basically white in color. Why? I have no idea. Yet, I also have no idea how or when or why I got past it either. One of the great mysteries is why our tastes change as we grow older and develop into fully functioning adults. I am so glad I have been able to grow as a person and explore new flavors and foods because I would have missed out on so much in life if I hadn't. When we try a new food, that memory of whether the experience was pleasant or not stays with us for years. It will be the deciding factor in whether we eat it again or not. For example, when I tried peanut butter the last time, it made it difficult to breath and I broke out in hives. So I don't plan to eat it again anytime soon. On the other hand...

I have been an athlete my entire life. From Karate as a child to Gymnastics, Cheerleading, and Track & Field as I grew up. The sore muscles from a workout were always my signal that I put in work that day and got some good things out of it. Many people will take Advil to help ease the pain of their aching muscles, but I never liked to. I wanted to feel the muscles 100% naturally and feel as they healed themselves over time. It helped me to gage whether or not I was recovering properly from the workouts and gaining the full benefits. I prefer to stay away from pain killers as much as possible, and many people question why I do so. I have many reasons as to why, but none were like the validation I felt when I read Ariel Glucklich's Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul .  This book showed me that there were so many different sides and dimensions when it came to pain. The way society has changed it's views on the subject in the past few centuries says it...

Blog 6             Hearing is one of our most important senses. It is one of the first senses we use in the womb. When a baby is in the womb it can already detect their mothers voice. That’s why in the womb the doctor advises you to play music and talk to your baby. When puppies are born their eyes are not developed, however they communicate with their mother and littermates through small squeaks. Hearing allows us to communicate with not only other humans, but other animals in general.         When I was training my mini labradoodle puppy, I used only positive reinforcement. I used a clicker and all natural treats to train. When she did something correct, I clicked the clicker, fed her a treat and lots of pats. She learned the clicking noise was positive because she associated the noise with treats and pats. This is how noise can help us communicate with our beloved pets. And ...

Blog 5 Our culture is one that heavily relies on vision. We use our eyes for most everything we do for example reading, cooking, sports and entertainment. What is an activity you can do without you eyes? Our culture is very visually centered. When it comes to our everyday lives vision plays a key role. As a predatory mammal our eyes are placed in the front of our head unlike a prey animal like a horse where their eyes are on either side of their head. Vision helped us not only secure food as hunters back in the day but also to communicate. We used symbols to communicate such as “icons”, “The creation of such images is perhaps the earliest form of human symbolization. People lifted out ordinary visible data of the world a shape, a form, which crystallized experience and with its meanings and connotations, told a story.” (Eck 12). Our eyes are also the first sense we use to find attraction. For example, if you are at the animal shelter you are initially drawn to th...

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/the-50-best-movies-about-serial-killers.html?a=1 In the book The Deepest Sense  there is a section that is devoted to the uses of pain. when reading this part and thinking about what I was reading, I could help but think about serial killers and why they do what they do. Do they get joy from inflicting pain? Is it a way for coping with their pain, or is it a way to control their pain. It also could be that these people are just psychopaths that have no remorse for other human beings. Maybe committing these crimes is the only way they get to experience their senses because they have isolated themselves from the world. It has crossed my mind that maybe serial killers such as Ted Bundy or Joseph DeAngelo have some sort of distortion of their senses. By this I mean maybe they are lacking attention to one of their senses and compensate by committing heinous crimes. Is there a way in which we can help people in our lives feel like they c...

Personally, I have always despised drawing and/or writing with chalk. I never quite knew what it was. Is it the feeling of it against the concrete? The blackboard? Is it the sound it makes if it moves just right? What is it that makes me physically cringe when I use chalk? With some research and discussion with other people, it seems to have something to do with the negative connotation of "nails on a chalkboard". It's a sound that will make anybody uncomfortable. Why? Because we have been told it's a bad sound. In an article published by Daily Mail it says " The researchers - led by Michael Oehler of the Macromedia University for Media and Communication in Cologne, Germany - found that the listeners who'd been told they were listening to fingernails were more disgusted and appalled than those who hadn't" (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2056640/Revealed-Why-fingernails-blackboard-sound-awful.html ).  This research is in support of...

Blog 4 The majority of people would prefer to give up the sense of smell; though I believe it is critical to our state of being. , The sense of smell if more important than one might think. No doubt we rely heavily on our sight and no one would want to jeopardize one’s vision. We rely solely on our vision. . However, everyday we use our sense of smell more than one would notice. Personally, I would be lost without my sense of smell. Not just because smell is related to taste, but I feel my sense of smell helps me recognize my loved ones and my surroundings. For example, I could recognize my mum’s smell in a sea of a million people. It is the smell that brings me to a safe place. As I child my mum would play tennis on Tuesdays. One day she was playing tennis and I patiently waited for her on the bench. A breeze seemed to blow by and I felt a little chilly. So I moseyed over to her tennis bag to look for her sweater. But as to my dismay I noticed her tennis bag was in...

Blog 3         Who doesn’t love eating sweets? I have always been one the biggest advocates to have cake for breakfast.  After all, it is just bread but in a different form. Some people may view sweets as childish behavior since children due crave something sugary; however,  I gravely disagree. I believe everyone finds pleasure giving in to their sweet tooth, but society evidently appears to frown upon this decadent behavior.         The sense of taste is more about pleasure.  Currently, this was not always the case. Back in our ‘hunter gather “  days, we relied on our sense of taste to notice the toxic morsels we could be collecting.  Aristotle seems to have been right. Animals who move to gather their food need taste to help them distinguish health-giving from dangerous substances.” (Fulton 202) Perhaps our society’s disdain for sweets stems from the artificial sweeteners that ...

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’...

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...