Things I Found Interesting About our Senses

From the book "The Natural History of the Senses" by Diane Ackerman

We can detect over 10,000 different odors.

Both children and adults, just by smelling, are able to determine whether a piece of clothing was worn by a male or female.

Smell is the mute sense, the one without words. Lacking a vocabulary to describe smells, we are left tongue-tied and groping in a sea of inarticulate pleasure. We tend to describe how smells make us feel. If there are words for all the pastels in a hue, the lavenders, mauves, plums, and lilacs, who will name the tones and tints of a smell? It’s as if we were hypnotized en masse and told to selectively forget.

Violets contain ionone, which short-circuits our sense of smell. The flower continues to exude its fragrance but we lose the ability to smell it. Wait a minute or two, and its smell will blare again.

Because animal musk is so close to human testosterone, we can smell it in portions of as little as 0.00000000000032 of an ounce. Women who sniffed musk developed shorter menstrual cycles, ovulated more often, and found it easier to conceive.

Weighlessness makes astronauts lose taste and smell.

One of the real tests of writers, especially poets, is how well they write about smells.

In India, the word for “kiss” means “smell.”

Meat eaters smell different from vegetarians.

There is nothing headier than the musky smell of a loved one moist with sweat.

When a man gets involved with a woman for any length of time, his facial hair starts to grow faster. Women who are cloistered away from men enter puberty later than women who are around men.

Mothers can pick out shirts worn by their child. Not true for fathers, who do not recognize their infant’s smell, but men can determine whether a t-shirt has been worn by a male or female.

Only humans sneeze with their mouths open.

Perfumers always test on the left arm – it’s the warmer arm because it’s nearer the heart.

Lavender can wake up one’s metabolism and make one more alert.

The reason it’s easier to get our feet wet first when we brave an icy ocean is that there aren’t as many cold receptors in the feet as there are on, for example, the tip of the nose.

Among some Orthodox Jews, a young woman must cut off her hair when she marries, lest her husband find her too attractive and wish to have sex with her out of desire rather than for procreation.

Men go bald from a high level of testosterone in the blood, which is why you don’t see bald castrati or eunuchs.

We sense cold over a wider range of our body than we do heat. Far more women than men claim to have cold hands and feet.

We moan on humid days when the outside air temperatures reel close to 98.6, the body starts to lose track of itself and suffers. If it’s also humid, which means the air is saturated with water, we still sweat to cool off in the usual way, but nothing happens. The air is too soggy to allow sweat to evaporate.

Fully tattooed people live shorter lives, because their skin can’t breathe properly and some inks are poisonous.

A Japanese wearing the work of a grand tattoo master may donate his skin to a museum or university. Tokyo University has 300 such masterpieces, framed.

Part of the reason heroin addicts need more and more of the drug to get high is because that drug causes the body to produce less of its own endorphins and begins to depend on the heroin to take over their task.

Twenty minutes of aerobic exercise is enough to stimulate the body to produce more endorphins, natural painkillers.

Pain requires our full attention. A simple and effective pain relief comes from lateral inhibition. If you stub your toe, rub the area around it. The pain will subside in the mass confusion.

Women have slightly higher pain thresholds than men.

Roman poet Ovid said, “offered a sexless heaven, I’d say no thank you, women are such sweet hell.”

Most people have no idea what real vanilla extract tastes and smells like. Of all the foods grown domestically in the world, vanilla requires the most labor. Vanilla comes from the string-bean like pod of a climbing orchid. It’s only as the beans ferment to wrinkled, crackly brown pods that the white dots of vanillin crystallize mellowly on their outsides and that famous robust aroma starts to saturate the air. The vanilla orchid is pollinated by only one type of bee, the tiny Melipone. Only saffron is a more expensive spice.

Truffles contain twice as much androstenol, a male pig hormone, as would normally appear in a male pig. Boar pheromone is chemically very close to the human male hormone, which may be why we find truffles arousing too.

We can smell something only when it evaporates.

Our brains and nervous systems have led us to prefer certain intervals between sounds.

Part of what’s fascinating about creativity in any field is the author’s necessity to share it with, or impose it, on the world.

One Harvard psychologist believes strongly that music is a kind of intelligence, an aptitude like that for words or numbers, with which we’re simply born. By experimenting with brain damaged musicians, he’s been able to locate musical ability in the right frontal region of the brain.

When the waltz first came in, it was thought to be avant-garde and scandalous.

Why is music mathematical? Because, as Pythagoras of Samos discovered in the 5th century b.c., notes can be precisely measured along a vibrating string, and the intervals between notes expressed as ratios.

Two forms of organized sound – words (rational sounds for objects, emotions, and ideas) and music (nonrational sounds for feelings). As Deryck Cooke observes, “both awaken in the hearer an emotional response; the difference is that a word awakens both an emotional response and a comprehension of its meaning, whereas a note, having no meaning, awakens only an emotional response.”

Music seems to produce specific emotional states that all people share, and as a result, it allows us to communicate our most intimate emotions without having to talk or define them in a loose net of words. Our pupils dialate and our endorphin level rises when we sing.

Tingles usually start at the back of the neck, creep over the face and across the scalp, dart along the shoulders, trickle down the arms, and then finally shiver up the spine. Isn’t it odd that intense emotion or esthetic beauty gives us chills?

A chord is something like an idea, and idea to be heard, an idea for the ear, an audible idea, says Victor Zuckerkandl.

Polphony coincided with the building of the great Gothic cathedrals, and the birth of harmony with the culmination of the Renaissance and the beginning of modern science and mathematics: that is, two great changes in our understanding of space. The tones mark time.

The unstated warrant for the composer, as for the poet, is to stretch the limits of the form, to try to fly within the narrow corridors of a cage. That tension between bright prison of a form and the freedom of imagination is what artistic genius is all about.

Seventy percent of the body’s sense receptors cluster in the eyes.

Lovers want to do serious touching, and not be disturbed. So they close their eyes as if asking two cherished relatives to leave the room.

One place on the retina, where the optic nerve enters the brain, has no rods or cones at all and, as a result, does not perceive light. We refer to it as our blind spot.

Because the rods see no color, we don’t perceive color at night.

A hawk leans into nothingness, peeling a layer of flight from thin air.

The sky is the one visual constant in all our lives, a complex backdrop to our every venture, thought, and emotion.

Why is it so thrilling to see a tree hold pieces of sky in its branches, and hear waves crash against a rocky shore, blowing spray high into the air, as the seagulls creak?

Then, at the horizon, a tiny green ingot hovers for a second, and vanishes. The “green flash” people call it, with mystical solemnity. But it is the briefest flash of green, and this is the first time in all my sunset-watching that I’ve seen it. The last color that plows through the atmosphere without being scattered is green, so sometimes we see a green flash right after the sun disappears. In space, the air appears to be black because there is no dust to scatter the blue light.

The Milky Way – the “backbone of the night” the Bushmen of the Kalahari call it. To the Swedes, it is the “winter street” leading to heaven.

Two black shapes in the fog reel into focus as cows. A calf reveals itself. Learning about the world is like this – watching and waiting for shapes to reveal themselves in the fog of our experience.

Color doesn’t occur in the world, but in the mind.

In the Hall of Gems at the Museum of Natural History in New York I once stood in front of a huge piece of sulfur so yellow I began to cry.

Turns barbed wire into a string of stars…

Polar bears are not white, they’re clear. Their transparent fur doesn’t contain a white pigment, but the hair shafts house many tiny air bubbles, which scatter the sun’s white light, and we register the spectacle as white fur.

British peppered moth, which took only fifty years to change from a lackluster salt-and-pepper gray to nearly black, so that it could blend in with tree bark that had become stained by industrial pollution.

Few insects are as beautiful and the eye of the goldeneye lacewing, a background of black topped by a perfect six-pointed star, which shimmers blue at its tips, green as you move inward, then yellow, and finally red at the center. http://www.treknature.com/gallery/Middle_East/photo13107.htm

When we watch a movie, we’re actually watching a blank screen for about half the time.

Though he was known for cutting off his ear, Van Gogh also hit himself with a club, went to many church services each Sunday, slept on a board, had bizarre religious hallucinations, drank kerosene, and ate paint. Some researchers now feel that a few of his stylistic quirks (coronas around streetlamps for example) may not have been intentional distortions at all but the result of illness, or poisoning from the paint thinners and resins he used, which could have damaged his eyes so that he saw halo effects around light sources. His own doctor said of him, “Genius and lunacy are well known next-door neighbors.”

According to Trevor-Roper, there is a myopic personality that artists, mathematicians, and bookish people tend to share. They have an “interior life different from others,” a different personality, because only the close-up world is visually available to them. The imagery in their work tends to pivot around things that “can be viewed at a very close range,” and they’re more introverted.

Mark Twain once described a J.M Turner painting as “like a ginger cat having a fit in a bowl of tomatoes.”

That doesn’t explain genius, of course, which has so much to do with risk, anger, a blazing emotional furnace, a sense of esthetic decorum, a savage wistfulness, lidless curiosity, and many other qualities, including a willingness to be fully available to life, to pause over both its general patterns and its ravishing details.

About the tendancy towards a disturbed existence in artists, Merleau-Ponty says: “This work to be done called for this life.”

Like it or not, a woman’s face has always been to some extent a commodity.

College men, asked what they considered to be the ideal components in a woman’s face, and the results fed into a computer. It was discovered that their ideal woman had wide cheekbones, eyes set high and wide apart, a smallish nose, high eyebrows, a small net chin, and a smile that could fill half of the face. What this geometry boils down to is a portrait of an ideal mother – a young, healthy woman. A mother had to be fertile, healthy, and energetic to protect her young and continue to bear lots of children, many of whom might die in infancy. Men drawn to such women had a stronger chance of their genes surviving.

Thanks heaven for the arousing qualities of zest, intelligence, wit, curiosity, sweetness, passion, talent, and grace. Thank heavens that, though good looks may rally one’s attention, a lasting sense of a person’s beauty reveals itself in stages.

Beauty is always an exception, always in despite of. This is why it moves us. To some extent, Art is like trapping nature inside a paperweight. Suddenly a locale, or an abstract emotion, is viewable at one’s leisure, falls out of flux, can be rotated and considered from different vantage points, becomes as fixed and to that extent as holy as the landscape. As John Berger puts it, “All the languages of art have been developed as an attempt to transform the instantaneous into the permanent. Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally.”

Intense emotion is stressful and we look to artists to feel for us, to suffer and rejoice, to describe the heights of their passionate response to life so that we can enjoy them from a safe distance, and get to know better what the full range of human experience really is. We look to artists to stop time for us, to break the cycle of birth and death and temporarily put an end to life’s processes. It is too much of a whelm for any one person to face up to without going into sensory overload. Artists, on the other hand, court that intensity. We ask artists to fill our lives with a cavalcade of fresh sights and insights, the way life was for us when we were children and everything was new.

Why should a gem strike us as beautiful? A diamond acts like a bunched prism. Light entering a diamond ricochets around inside it, reflects from the back of it, and spreads out its colors more ebulliently than through an ordinary glass prism. A skilled diamond cutter enables light to streak along inside the stone’s many facets and shoot out of the jewel at angles. Turn the diamond in your hand, and you see one pure color followed by another.

Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.

The feeling of low-level wind shear in the heart we call loss.

The pen is the tongue of the mind. Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote

For some people with synesthesia, that sensory blending never quits, and they taste baked beans whenever they hear the word “Francis,” as one woman reported, or see yellow on touching a matte surface, or smell the passage of time. The stimulation of one sense stimulates another.

If you wished to create instant synesthesia, a dose of mescaline or hashish would do nicely by exaggerating the neural connections between the senses.

Some of the most famous synesthetes have been artists. To Rimsi-Korsakov, C Major was white; to Scriabin it was red. A major was rosy, to Scriabin it was green. Both associated E major with blue.

Rimbaud claimed that the only way an artist can arrive at life’s truths is by experiencing “every form of love, of suffering, of madness,” to be prepared for by “a long immense planned disordering of all the senses.”

Great artists feel at home in the luminous spill of sensation, to which they add their own complex sensory Niagara.

Writers, we questers after the perfect word, the glorious phrase that will somehow make the exquisite avalance of consciousness sayable. We who live in mental barrios, where any roustabout idea may turn to honest labor, if only it gets the right incentive – a bit of drink, a light flogging, a delicate seduction.

Katherine Mansfield once said that it took “terrific hard gardening” to produce inspiration”; the hard gardening of knowing where and when and for how long and precisely in what way to walk, and then the will to go out and walk it as often as possible, even when one is tired or isn’t in the mood, or has only just walked it to no avail.

Artists are notorious for stampeding their senses into duty, and they’ve sometimes used remarkable tricks of synesthesia. The poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk and would inhale their pungent bouquet when he needed to find the right word. Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin and many others felt that they did their best work is they wrote in the nude. D.H. Lawrence once even confessed that he liked to climb naked up mulberry trees – a fetish of long limbs and rough bark that stimulate his thoughts. Colette used to being her day’s writing by first picking fleas from her cat. Alexander Dumas wrote his nonfiction on rose colored paper, his fiction on blue, and his poetry on yellow. George Sand went directly from lovemaking to her writing desk, much piquing her lover Alfred de Musset. Voltaire used his lover’s naked back as a writing desk. Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twin, and Truman Capote all used to lie down when they wrote, with Capote going so far as to declare himself a “completely horizontal writer.”

A.E. Houseman, when asked to define poetry, had the good sense to say, “I could no more define poetry than a terrier can a rat, but I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us…If I were obliged to name the class of things to which it belongs, I should call it a secretion.”

Steven Spender says in his essay, “The Making of a Poem”: There is always a slight tendency of the body to sabotage the attention of the mind by providing some distraction…the concentrated effort of writing poetry is a spiritual activity which makes one completely forget, for the time being, that one has a body and mind and for this reason one needs a kind of anchor of sensation with the physical world.”

I have a pine plank that I lay across the sides of the tub so that I can stay in a bubble bath for hours and write. In the bath, the water displaces much of your weight and you feel light, your blood pressure drops. When the water temperature and the body temperature converge, my mind lifts free and travels by itself.

Many writers I know become fixated on a single piece of music when they are writing a book, and play the same piece of music perhaps a thousand times in the course of a year. Every time the music plays, it recreates the emotional terrain the writer knows the book to live in.

The poets May Swenson and Howard Nemerov both told me that they like to sit for a short spell each day and copy down whatever pours through their heads from “The Great Dictator” ad Neverov labels it, then plow through to see what gems may lie hidden in the rock.

My muse is male, has the radiant silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to me directly.

Molecules are always moving. The book in front of you is actually squirming beneath your fingertips.

Men’s testosterone levels jump when a new woman enters the room. Same is true for women and their hormones when a new man enters the room.

There is nothing like the thrill of being new for someone.

Robert Louis Stevenson – “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”