Smells and Bells

When I hear the term "sixth sense", the first thing that comes to mind (beyond the film, of course) is intuition. To me, that is what a sixth sense typically is- some manifestation of foresight or a strong feeling. The group that presented on sixth sense made me rethink this fairly rigid definition in my mind, however. What does constitute a sixth sense? Can it be coincidence or deja vu, or in order to call one of these a sixth sense, does a person have to experience them often? What happens if someone experiences both of these often- is one a sixth sense and one a seventh sense? As Emily suggested, do we all have the potential to unleash our own special ability if we only believe that we can? So, backing up- what constitutes a sixth sense? A lot of our classmates shared their own "grandparent stories" and I'm sorry to do the same, but I've been thinking about this since class on Thursday. In 1985, my aunt was killed in a plane crash on November 25th. Flas...

Anyone who has met my dad would be surprised to know that some of his closest friends are women who practice all kinds of movement and touch therapy. His friend Celine is a massage therapist in addition to being certified in reiki. I grew up with her making house calls and giving my family different soaps and products for healing and wellness. His other friend Traca is a yoga instructor and energy healer who works with both of us to strengthen our bodies and spirits. She told me about Kripalu, a yoga and wellness center in Western Massachusetts, and encouraged me to go. And so when Elizabeth Robinson came into class, saying I was excited was an understatement- this was material that I was very familiar with and excited by. I have always been a big supporter of the healing power of massage and reiki, and have hoped to incorporate these more natural remedies into my own practice after college. Kripalu in the summer Elizabeth Robinson's passion for JourneyDance surprised me b...

Touch is often thought of as one of the lower senses, but I think that's because people take it for granted. Unique in its reciprocity, we are touching everything all the time, and it touches us back. While strange to think about at first, we are really experiencing touch every second of our lives. I found it the most interesting that we need touch to live and thrive, and without it, babies can be susceptible to developmental risks or even death. We had touched on this before in psychology classes I've taken- the importance of a nurturing mother's touch for her babies. Harry Harlow's famous experiments on baby monkeys illustrated how integral the sensation of touch was to the babies. Given either a surrogate mother made of wire or a more comfortable one made of cloth, the baby monkeys chose to spend more time with the cloth one, even when the wire one was their source of nourishment. We tend to think of animals (and even humans, sometimes) as only requiring nourishme...

We've all heard the expression "You have to see it to believe it!" When people talk about a particularly shocking or unbelievable experience, they confirm its validity by stating that they "saw it with their own eyes!" We take that to be an ultimate truth. But is it? Maybe vision is not the absolute end all, be all for truth. Maybe, as Diana Eck puts it, seeing is really just another form of touch. This extends into our lives today; when someone has an object that we are interested in, we ask "Can I see?" and proceed to hold out our hands. I can remember being young and being told that we see with our eyes, not with our hands (as a means of not grabbing and taking things from others). But is that true? And if seeing is another form of communion and communication, is touch another form of seeing? Professor Nelson's talk made me wonder how much we can actually trust our eyes. Our language puts a great emphasis on sight- think of words like insigh...

We all have times when we don't feel like ourselves. I think a lot of seniors are feeling this way right now- anxious, confused, stressed, emotional- the list goes on. Yesterday I woke up feeling strange, almost disconnected from my surroundings. In this weird transitory time, I wasn't surprised, but I was unsure of how to shake this feeling and come back into my body. At lunch, my roommate and I grabbed one of the desserts from the dining hall because it looked appealing. However, upon smelling it and savoring its taste, we came to the conclusion that (like many foods here) it did not taste at all like what it was meant to be. That's when it hit me- focusing on the sensory experience of trying a bite of the dessert brought me back into my body. My mind came down from the cloud that it was on and I felt more in tune with myself. I knew what to do from there. Some people use religion as their primary means of reconnecting with themselves, while at the same time experiencin...

I did not grow up with any sort of structured religion, but what I did know from a young age was music. I loved to sing and dance to the radio, and my family would get together at holidays and bring multiple guitars so we could make music together. Having been involved with many choruses over the years, I have sung a great number of spiritual pieces, but nothing like Bach's St. John Passion. I was at once blown away by the first note; the intensity of the piece is set up from the very beginning. Not being able to understand the words unless I focused intently on the program, I tuned in to the music alone. Its complexity and beauty really spoke to me. I did not experience the concert on a spiritual level as many others most likely did; I really had little context for the text itself. However, I can imagine that the musical elements complimented it perfectly, alternating between full and strong choral lines and softer, more warbling solos. Also, being able to focus on the musi...

We've discussed (and experienced) the interesting ways in which smell is closely tied to memory. The experience of a scent is instantaneous; without conscious thought, we are taken back in time to when we smelled the specific aroma either for the first time or in a particularly important or memorable time. It is no question that each of us could come up with an example of this without giving it much thought. In talking about taste, we have also uncovered that most of our sense of taste is actually smell. Dr. Rachel Herz showed us this in action when she had us plug our nose and eat jellybeans. When we were unable to smell, we were unable to taste individual flavors; our experience of the jellybean was reduced to a sense of sweetness. So, then, wouldn't it mean that taste and memory are also closely related? Take for example the Disney movie Ratatouille in which the icy exterior of the harsh food critic is melted when he takes a bite of the title food and is instantly tran...

JBK and Professor Dyer's article was really interesting and made a lot of sense to me- of course we prefer foods that are fermented with our own bacteria, both from the soil of our home and from our own bodies. Otherwise, such foods wouldn't agree with us. Like certain cheese smells similar to feet, we tend to reject the unfamiliar and experience it as bad. Our associations with seeing food from the "other" as also being "other" only serves to complicate things. If your culture views a particular religious or ethnic group as dirty, for example, everything about that group, including their food, is then seen in the same light. While some of this exists today, I can only imagine how much more apparent it was in Biblical times, when Jews would not drink Gentile wine because of its contamination in their mind. However, in our society today, we can get a taste of just about any culture's food that we want, and typically pretty quickly. Even being at Wh...

Ever since Dr. Rachel Herz's lecture on Thursday, I've been telling anyone who will listen about some of the things that she said. For those who seem more interested than others, I've told them (and suggested that they try) the jellybean test that Dr. Herz had us do. I did the test with two of my friends when we were out for lunch at our favorite restaurant, and the response was almost sad. It was hard to imagine being unable to taste because of an inability to smell, especially in terms of really enjoying food (as is true of the place where we were). This experiment prompted a discussion of anosmia, and how permanent and truly debilitating that it can be. (side note: this was another thing that I hadn't really considered before the lecture, even when we were reading Diane Ackerman's book. Smell is constant and so necessary that without it, people can experience such an enormous disconnect. ANYWAY-) When I first brought up anosmia, my boyfriend's response was...

When reading Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses , I personally found smell to be the most intriguing sense that we possess. Words escape the experience of a scent, and time does not wear down our ability to smell, unlike hearing and vision, which can fade with age. Naturally, I was looking forward to doing more reading on olfaction, but once again it left me wishing I could attach some sort of "scent clip" to this blog post (hey, maybe someday). Although Deborah Green notes that calling to mind an orange does not enable us to experience the scent of one, smell as a sense is so closely tied to memory that the reverse can, and often does, occur. Even as a psychology major, the tendency of professionals in the field to pathologize what could, in many cases, be considered normal frustrates me to no end. Thus, Deborah Green's discussion on Freud in The Aroma of Righteousness made me a little angry. Freud was wildly popular in his day and his views, wh...