Smells and Bells

We know the five major senses- touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing- and we know that there are many senses beyond those ones we tend to limit ourselves to- like your sense of pain or temperature. But how many other senses are there?  Which one is our sixth sense? In The Deepest Sense , I was most fascinated by the chapter on animals. Because they had a good example for what I believe is the sixth sense that ties society together. That is, one's sense of justice. Justice is something that you perceive, and it is something that is perceived by the rest of nature, or at least our closer relatives in the animal kingdom. In that experiment, one of the monkeys was upset by the injustice of the other monkey getting better treatment. This is the cornerstone of every great society- the distributing proper treatment of people and the earth. When there is great inequality, people rise up, because they sense that justice has failed them. Sure, sensing ghosts is probably the most wel...

All the presentations that had to do with taste this semester really shook up my understanding of how my much loved linguistic mouth muscle makes do diligently delivering sensations synaptically. I was surprised by how little my tongue tastes, but also by how influential that little snippet of information is. The miracle berries were neat! Mostly glad I can knock them off my "things the internet told me to try" list. But the experience was invaluable, and set up for what else I was to learn about my taster, that tongue. I remember the lemons basically tasted like one of those gummi candy lemons, even  though I am usually akin to those dogs you see in gifs freaking out after being given a sour sample. Dogs, of course, don't have the same taste buds as humans. Yet sour is a universal dislike among humans and canines.  If a creature has the same sense of taste as a human, does that mean it enjoys foods the same way? Wild canines and felines both have similar group meal...

 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...

I was intrigued by Diane Ackerman's depictions of artists, and especially writers, in her chapter Courting the Muse , plunging their synaptic buckets deep into their word wells with the help of the outside world. Describing the search for inspiration through our senses  was a terrific way to tie up the book, since this quest pushes us to discover the limits and subtleties of all our senses. I was a little confused why she included a few lines, like the Edith Sitwell bit about how she'd chill in a coffin before writing. While Edith absolutely looks like somebody who would emerge from a coffin to write poetry, was it the touch of the padding inside that she craved? Is there a fresh coffin smell? Or perhaps, she was reaching out into the void- towards the unknown, a sixth sensation? Was there ever a dead body in it? Coffins are more of a mood, to me at least, than sensual experiences. They have too much emotional and cultural baggage.  I haven't been in a coffin though, so ...

In the chapter on touch, Diane Ackerman suggests that shoe shining is one of humanity's "frequent emporiums of touch". That actually really bothered me. Now, I'm not a millionaire, and I don't live in the nineteenth century, so I've never been drawn to have my shoes shined. But I've walked by shoe shiners, seen them longingly stare at the scuffed shoes of passerby in  the Boston and Providence train stations. http://www.asiatraveltips.com/newspics/0610/HongKongAirportShoeShine.jpg Now, I agree, it is a fact that a shoe shiner must touch the shoes of the shoe shinee to perform their duty, but to cite shoe shining as if touch was the most important sense involved- that's just ignoring what shoe shining is all about. Do you get your shoes shined because you enjoy feeling your shoes? Or because you want them to look better? There is a factor of preventing wear and tear, but a shoe shining is not a foot massage. The only touching involved is indirec...