A Natural History of the Senses (45 page)
Read A Natural History of the Senses Online
Authors: Diane Ackerman
Life teaches us to be guarded. We use words like
vulnerable
when we mean that we are letting down a drawbridge over the moat of
our self-protection and trusting another inside the fortress of our lives. Lovers combine their senses, blend their electrical impulses, help sense for one another. When they touch, their bodies double in size. They get under each other’s skin, literally and emotionally. During intercourse, a man hides part of himself in a woman, a bit of his body disappears from view, while a woman opens up the internal workings of her body and adds another organ to it, as if it were meant to be there all along. These, in a starched, stiff, dangerous world, are ultimate risks.
But suppose you could sense any world you wanted to? At NASA’s Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, California, researchers have been perfecting “Virtual Reality” garb—a mask and gloves that extend one’s senses, which are, both in appearance and power, reminiscent of the magic regalia heroes sometimes relied on in epic sagas. Don the sensor-equipped gloves, and you can reach into a computer-generated landscape and move things around. Wear the mask, and you can see an invisible or imaginary world as if it were perfectly viewable, full of depth and color—it might be the rolling sand dunes of Mars, or an approach to O’Hare Airport in fog, or perhaps a faulty space station generator. Why watch a murder mystery from across a room, when you can put on a mask and glove and walk right into the action and handle the clues. How could such a sleight of hand, mind, mask, and senses be possible?
One of the most profound paradoxes of being human is that the thick spread of sensation we relish isn’t perceived directly by the brain. The brain is silent, the brain is dark, the brain tastes nothing, the brain hears nothing. All it receives are electrical impulses—not the sumptuous chocolate melting sweetly, not the oboe solo like the flight of a bird, not the tingling caress, not the pastels of peach and lavender at sunset over a coral reef—just impulses. The brain is blind, deaf, dumb, unfeeling. The body is a transducer (from Latin,
transducere
, to lead across, transfer), a device that converts energy of one sort to energy of another sort, and that is its genius. Our bodies take mechanical energy and convert it to electrical energy. I touch the soft petal of a red rose called “Mr. Lincoln,” and my receptors translate that mechanical touch into electrical impulses
that the brain reads as soft, supple, thin, curled, dewy, velvety: rose petal-like. When Walt Whitman said: “I sing the body electric,” he didn’t know how prescient he was. The body does indeed sing with electricity, which the mind deftly analyzes and considers. So, to some extent, reality is an agreed-upon fiction. How silly, then, that philosophers should quarrel about appearance and reality. The universe will be knowable to other creatures in other ways.
A dolphin has a brain as complex as our own; it has language, culture, and emotions. It has its own society, with codes of conduct, family groups, and a civilization, but it lives in a world on “our” planet, as we like to say with chauvinistic bravado, unimaginably different from our own. We may have much to learn from it. Deep down, we know our devotion to reality is just a marriage of convenience, and we leave it to the seers, the shamans, the ascetics, the religious teachers, the artists among us to reach a higher state of awareness, from which they transcend our rigorous but routinely analyzing senses and become closer to the raw experience of nature that pours into the unconscious, the world of dreams, the source of myth. “How do you know but that every bird that cleaves the aerial way is not an immense world of delight closed to your senses five?” William Blake wrote. We have much to learn from and about the senses of animals. Otherwise, how shall we hope to be good caretakers of the planet, should that turn out to be our role? How shall we appreciate our small part in the web of life on Earth? How shall we understand the minds of extraterrestrials, if we make contact with them? How shall we come to know one another deeply, compassionately, fulfillingly, unless we learn more of how the mind and senses work? Our several senses, which feel so personal and impromptu, and seem at times to divorce us from other people, reach far beyond us. They’re an extension of the genetic chain that connects us to everyone who has ever lived; they bind us to other people and to animals, across time and country and happenstance. They bridge the personal and the impersonal, the one private soul with its many relatives, the individual with the universe, all of life on Earth. In REM sleep, our brain waves range between eight and thirteen hertz, a frequency at which flickering light can trigger epileptic seizures. The tremulous
earth quivers gently at around ten hertz. So, in our deepest sleep, we enter synchrony with the trembling of the earth. Dreaming, we become the Earth’s dream.
It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery. However many of life’s large, captivating principles and small, captivating details we may explore, unpuzzle, and learn by heart, there will still be vast unknown realms to lure us. If uncertainty is the essence of romance, there will always be enough uncertainty to make life sizzle and renew our sense of wonder. It bothers some people that no matter how passionately they may delve, the universe remains inscrutable. “For my part,” Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
*
For example, the face swells as body fluids drift upward, and the brain signals the body to get rid of this excess fluid by urinating more and drinking less.
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