Smells and Bells

Taste is an incredibly important sense that we often take for granted. All humans navigate the world with so much reliance on vision, hearing, smell, and touch, but taste is not deemed as useful. It is easy to comprehend this sense as being expendable compared to the other senses, however, the sensation of gustation is incredible. It is impossible to detect the safety of ingesting some substances without taste. A few tastes set off alarms in our body and feel dangerous to consume such as soap, rotten foods, or poisonous objects (animals and plants).  Despite the foundation of the sense of taste, different people's tastes are unique. In  The Natural History of the Senses  by Diane Ackerman, the uniqueness of taste's is compared to fingerprints. Multiple people could live in a very similar situation and still "no two of us taste the same plum...everyone's saliva is different distinctive, flavored by diet, whether or not they smoke, heredity, perhaps even moo...

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’...

Music is something seemingly inherent to human nature. As far back as there is evidence for speaking there is evidence for music. The kind of melodies are surprisingly complex, too. Ackerman gives credit to the European middle ages for the development of polyphony, or individual parts coming together and harmonizing, but this actually began much earlier. Hurrian tablets found in sites like Ugarit contain instructions for playing hymns. The oldest of these dates all the way back to 1400 BCE, and what can be translated of the lyrics reveals that it was a hymn for the goddess of orchards. The video above is what it would have sounded like. The melody involves call and response and, more significantly, harmonies. Both call and response and harmonies are forms of communication through music. This is significant because it often requires more than one person to play. The implication is that music has been used to communicate for thousands of years, perhaps since humans began to talk to ea...

In Diane Ackerman's description of sound she says that sound is air molecules that move in waves that begin with the movement of any object. These waves enter the outer ear which is like a funnel and vibrates the eardrum, the hammer, anvil and stirrup bones (the tiniest bones in the human body) which press fluid in the inner ear triggering the cochlea hairs which signal nerves. However, there is one misconception present very early on in this explanation. Sound does not simply travel in waves . Instead sound travels in spheres . Scientist John Stewart Reid was the first to officially introduce this new understanding of sound. Here is an excerpt from his writing on the subject: " Sound in air is the transfer of periodic movements between adjacent colliding atoms or molecules. This sonic energy typically expands away from the site of the collisions as a spherical or bubble-shaped emanation, the surface of which is in a state of radial oscillation. The sonic bubble expands ...

Diane Ackerman states that “Chant ‘om’ or any other mantra, in a solid, prolonged tone, and you will feel the bones in your head, as well as the cartilage in your sternum, vibrate” (205).  If you close your eyes and chant ‘om’ or simply hum, you feel the sound through your whole body.  These vibrations can even be felt sitting silently in a room, surrounded by the chant of ‘om’.  There is something powerful about the sound, because you can feel it in your heart as the vibrations course through your body.   In late July 2014, I traveled to Dharmshala and McLeod Ganj in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.  I was on a course to learn about traditional health care practices in Northern India and McLeod Ganj was the last stop of our trip. The town of McLeod Ganj has a high Tibetan population because it is where the Dalai Lama resides, who fled there in 1959.  The Indian Government have a Tibetans in Exile program that was created in 1960.   ...

Diane Ackerman brought to light a fascinating observation that I have never encountered before in her Natural History of the Senses. She shared that the ocean is inside of us. This idea really resonated with me. She begins by sharing that "Our sense of smell, like many of our other body functions, is a throwback to that time, early in evolution when we thrived in the oceans"(pg. 20). The blood in our veins, which mirror the tides in their pulsing is mainly salt water. Ackerman explains that "we are small marine environments on the move, with salt in our blood, our urine, our flesh, our tears" (149).  To  smell , an odor must dissolve into a watery solution before our mucous membranes can absorb it. The  smell  of the vagina has a history of being reported to smell fishy. Sponges a sea creature have a profound sense of touch that allows them to feel every quiver in the water. Our need for touch is first developed in the moving waters of womb w...

How would you feel if someone told you they'd touched the hand of a saint? Source: bristolnews.blogspot.com That's a question you might have been able to answer if you lived in medieval Europe. Medieval history has always fascinated me, and religion was obviously a huge component of the medieval lifestyle--particularly, of course, in terms of the rise of Christianity. In those days, the foundations of that religion were just beginning to come together, and thus, it would have been easy enough to preserve the finger bone of a deceased martyr or saint--for these martyrs and saints lived and died during the time period. Relics in Christianity are essentially a representation, a remaining figment, of a holy person's body that illustrates how the body is irrevocably connected to the soul in the Christian faith. If a holy person died, preserving their body was extremely important because they would need it when Judgment Day occurred and souls were reunited with their bodi...

The ritual I did with different kinds of fruits on the first day of class comes a "seder" for Tu B'Shvat ("The 15th of Sh'vat" - the Jewish New Year for the Trees).  I wrote a short description of this text in the Jewish food blog The Jew and the Carrot here: The Original Tu B’Shvat Seder: 'Pri Etz Hadar' According to what we've read in Diane Ackerman's Natural History of The Senses , everything we know about the world we live in is mediated to us through our senses.  But what in particular do are senses "tell" us that is so important to know? Our senses alert us to what is food, who would be a good mate, and predators that might be out to get us. Our senses give us pleasurable rewards presumably for what is good for us to smell, touch, taste, hear, and see. And we experience disgust or pain for things that are presumably bad for us. However, it's also possible that not everything that feels pleasurable to us is alwa...