Natural History of the Senses Post Script

Diane Ackerman's treatment of the subject of the language (and lack thereof) that surrounds "A Natural History of the Senses" was enjoyable to read. I particularly appreciated how she picked out how we must rely on similies to ever describe smell. She gives the example "In The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, novelist Paul West writes that “blood smells like dust.” An arresting metaphor, one that relies on indirection, as metaphors of smell almost always do." (8) She even describes one scent through the imagery of taste, "I can taste something thick and amber, like butterscotch, on the back of my tongue. It has a thin vinyl covering to it and a fizzy muskiness seems to be coming up all around it in a halo. It smells deeply luscious." (53) Wine connoisseurs, like my parents, use an established language amongst their community, saying that a wine tastes "oaky" or "heavy" or "strong", language that could just as easily be used to describe a tree or a burly man. Oftentimes to understand how important vision is, someone might ask you to describe what a color looks like. We can either find examples of things that are also that color, blue sky, green grass, red apple, or we can use the scientific wavelengths, but neither have gotten a blind person any closer to understanding the color. Describing a musical to a truly deaf person would be just as difficult, though many in the deaf community particularly enjoy music as they feel rather than hear the vibrations. To someone paralyzed or numb, what does soft skin or a scratchy beard feel like if you have nothing to compare it to? Knowing that our understanding of the world around us falls apart without an established memory to create an analogy, the questions it raises are numerous. Does racism stem from our evolutionary past of distinguishing light=good, nutrition, dark=unknown? Perhaps that is why the vampire culture is so fascinating to us, particularly now in an age after banning segregation (though racism pervades), because vampires up-end our traditional dichotomy of light and dark, (they sleep during the day and their flesh is burned by sunlight). There was so much more fascinating material to Ackerman's book (her obsession with relating the senses back to sex, though mainly excluding anything other than heteronormative sexual acts). I am really fascinated by the treatment of relating the senses to the brain waves as we still grasp to understand its relationship. An ongoing tool I have been using is the Mindflex Hack which captures data from brainwaves using an electroencephalography sensor. While my projects so far have dealt with meditation and chakras, I would be interested to conduct more research on brainwaves and the senses by introducing new smells, or new textures or something in that vein.