Smells and Bells

I have a pin on my backpack that's a picture of a tree with arms around it, and beneath it is the word 'hugger.' Tree hugger. I've always been a tree hugger, there's hardly anything I love more than going into the woods (preferably barefoot and preferably when it's warm out) and just walking among the trees, feeling the bark, watching how the sun shines through the leaves and hearing the wind through the branches. I'm just now realizing how woods walks really make use of all your senses. Tu BiSh'vat, the Jewish Festival of the Trees just took place, and recently, my mom sent me this article basically about the science of tree hugging. What is says, is that a recent scientific study has proven that tree hugging, and just being in the vicinity of trees, is good for you. Everything vibrates right? On an atomic level, everything is vibrating at its own frequency, and the "vibrational properties," as the authors describe it, that trees give off...

In class today Doctor Herz referred to taste and smell as the "chemical senses," because they are used to detect and perceive the actual molecules of a substance in a way that the brain can understand -- the chemical senses literally sense chemicals. However, detecting a substance first requires that it be internalized (whether in the mouth or nose), which contributes to the perception of these senses as "lower." Personally, though, I think its really cool that our bodies come equipped with their own molecular scanners. That is, after all, what these chemical senses are doing when they analyze the molecular composition of a substance. Taste and smell are designed so that they detect different types of substances and provide information about them -- smell detects small hydrophobic and lipophilic molecules in the air while taste detects the hydrophilic molecules dissolve in our saliva. This difference in what the two senses detect helps explain those things t...

                                          In big bold letters in my notebook from Professor Kirkpatrick's visit is the phrase "DETECTION TO PERCEPTION TO INTERPRETATION," which is basically a map of how our brains process the input from our senses so that they can be responded to. Detection and perception are biologically fascinating, but I'm more interested in interpretation, because it is the step where value is decided -- if a scent, taste, touch, etc is good or bad. The perception of a sensory experience is important for this judgement, but all perception is colored by interpretation. The example professor Kirkpatrick used was smoke. In most cases, it would be most advantageous for the smell of smoke to trigger a danger response. However, this is not my response. I smell smoke as I walk through the my neighborhood or the nearby woods and my nostrils flair. I am ...

Like I said in class today, it's easy to romanticize our senses. They allow us to interact with the world in countless ways, such the great art, music and food that they allow us to create and enjoy. We are able to do so many different things, consciously and unconsciously, with our senses that it's easy to get wrapped up in what they have become, but I think it's important to take a step back and think about where they came from. And I don't mean how each sense evolved, I mean senses. When it comes right down to it, senses are methods evolved by organisms to allow them to be aware of their environment so that they can adjust behavior accordingly. One of the defining features of life is homeostasis, which refers to the process by which variables are regulated and internal conditions within an organism are kept relatively stable regardless of external conditions. Basically, the ability to react to stimuli. On a cellular level, this process can be particularly fascinati...