by Maureen Seaberg, 2023
I was so excited to read this book! I heard about 10 minutes of an interview on the radio program, 1A, with the author and it was so intriguing. I was very disappointed. I thought it was going to describe people with super senses, but it ended up being so disorganized and convoluted, I’m not sure what I read. I tried to make sense of it, but the final chapters were so out there – people wanting to impart human consciousness into robots. Scary stuff.
I did take some tidbits from it – humans have better senses than we realize and by training them, we can become better at seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting. It’s important to spend time in nature. Meditation can augment our senses.
A retired Scottish nurse smelled COVID before it was known. She also smelled Parkinson’s Disease on her husband years before he was diagnosed.
The author is a tetrachrome – she has 4 visual cones, or something like that, and can see more colors. She talks about ‘synesthetes,’ who sense things through other senses, like seeing a color when you hear a name. Infants are all synesthetes. We can cultivate our senses. In Montessori schools, children walk on a white tape line to cultivate balance, they hold objects of different weights but similar sizes, they sit in silence so they can hear birdsong, ticking clocks. All of these things cultivate the senses. “Hearing grows subtler this way, and self-control is also enhanced.”
Examples of synesthete musicians: Chris Martin of Coldplay, Billie Eilish. Scientists – Richard Feynman and Nikola Tesla.
It’s possible that people who are picky eaters are really super tasters and the taste of the food is very intense.
Minfulness is a a way to grow our senses. Constantly taking pictures is not mindfulness, is not being present.
Talking about taste, the tongue has two to four thousand taste buds. We can identify sweet, salty, savory (umami), sour, and bitter, but also Kokumi (savory and hearty), and pungent, astringent, rough or harsh, oily or greasy, and winy. We can also taste fresh water. Makes sense – we would need super sensitive taste in order to survive in the world.
Talking about the sense of hearing, she describes Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who is deaf in his right ear. He trained the hearing in his left ear by using all of his senses.
There are more than the five senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste. Some other senses are: Thermoception – the sense of heat, Nociception – the perception of pain, Equilibrioception – the perception of balance, Proprioception – the perception of body awareness.
The world has become so smooth – our screens and phones are all smooth. That might explain the popularity of tattoos now –people seeking the sensation. Not being touched could explain a host of mental illnesses – depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness. A study in 1960 by Sidney Jourard watched friends in a cafe for an hour. In England, the friends touched each other 0 times. In America, the friends touched each other twice. In France, 110 times. In Puerto Rico, 180 times.
Some people with Autism are hyper-sensitive to touch, sometimes to the point of not being able to swallow food.
This I find hard to believe, but she says ancient languages did not have a word for blue. She references a Radiolab report, “Why Isn’t the Sky Blue.” So if there isn’t a word for the color, it doesn’t really exist.
The goofy part near the end, talking about AI and people who are sensitive to machines, and wanting to impart human consciousness into machines, is where she really loses me. She talks about a man, Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president in 2016 and 2020. He is conservative and “transhuman.” He says, “While transhumanism is very broad in what it attempts to accomplish, achieving sentience in AI is paramount. The only way to really upgrade the human brain in singularity terms is to upload our consciousness, and once we do that, AI will be conscious. Of course, there’s the issue of AI becoming sentient before we merge with it, but most transhumanists advocate against this. The reason is that the AI might not want to merge with us or it even may want to eliminate us. So we’d better get it right.” No kidding. I do not want to live in that world. You all can have it.
When we die (as we all will) and go to Jesus, our Creator, our senses will be blown away by the beauty, the love, the joy, the amazing, all-encompassing, never-ending wonder of it all. We can’t handle it now – our human brains would explode at the experience this side of heaven. But this book did introduce to me the idea of becoming more present, more aware, experiencing more fully the senses we do have in this world, and thereby experiencing the beauty of this world more fully, and thanking God.
I liked the two quotes she chose for the opening:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” William Black, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“For I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” Psalm 139:14
It also reminds me of Sherry Yost’s tag line on her emails: To not pay attention is to miss the wonder of being alive. -Bob Welch