Smells and Bells

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...

In my last post, I talked about color and colorblindness, and how color was such a personal experience. That statement got me thinking, because, when it really comes down to it, everything we experience is a personal experience. No one ever feels the same way. We may use the same general terms to attempt to describe our experiences, but in the end only we really know how we feel. Our senses and emotions have a deep connection. Another blog I found from Tufts University states that "what we sense triggers a feeling" which becomes a conceptual association. This could be anything- the blog goes into how seeing a cup of coffee, tasting coffee, hearing a coffee maker, smelling coffee beans can make us feel energized or happy. This happens all around us, though we may not know it. The sun after a long winter, for example. I feel refreshed and excited and energized on that first beautiful morning of spring, and that conceptual association leads me into my day happy. Most of the time...

In our society, touch and the desire to be touched get a bit of a bum wrap. However, touch in general and the touching of others serves very important social functions. In her book, Ackerman talked about how sight in infants remains undeveloped for a fairly long time, which means that the very important realization that a separation exists between the self and anything else is formed by touch. Before they know anything else, babies learn that their bodies take up space and learn that other objects take up space too. However, to these babies who have very little understanding beyond what they feel, the caregiver that feeds, protects, and touches them is inseparable from the rest of the outside world. To them, the outside world is protection. Upon growing, and gaining a more full understanding of the world around them, people realize that it is not the outside world that protects them, but others who care for them. The early lesson, however, that touch is safety, is h...

I thought that the St. John's Passion by Bach was a beautiful piece, which I really enjoyed listening to. However, despite the swelling music and beautiful singing, the experience didn't feel like a religious one to me. Perhaps this was because it was in a language I don't really understand and about a gospel I don't really believe in, but I could tell there was something more to it than that. If ritual is a mode of paying attention, then this piece of music clearly represents this mode in both its composition and its performance. It is religious music, but I didn't feel it. This is obviously not a shortcoming of the music, but a matter of what I find religious, what I feel compelled to pay attention to. Listening to this beautiful work of religious devotion, yet feeling no religious experience caused me to realize how personal a religious experience is, and I began asking myself some questions about what I do find religious, and what it means to find an exp...