Coming to Our Senses
Smell is the only sense you can’t turn off. You can close your eyes,
cover your ears, refrain from touching or tasting. But we smell all the time and with
every breath, twenty thousand times a day.
Noses are conspicuous. They hold center stage on our faces, reaching
out into the world, demanding attention. We don’t count mouths, we count noses.
We look down them, pay through them and run the risk of putting them out of joint.
People in other cultures don’t necessarily share our traditional
construct of there being five senses. The Hausa of Nigeria divide our senses into just two
categories, with sight in one and everything else lumped together, in the other. And in
some Buddhist systems, mind is classified as the sixth sense. Even in the West, there is
no real agreement about the number: Plato added senses of heat, cold, pleasure,
discomfort, desire and fear to the list, Philo of Alexandria felt it was necessary to
include a religious sense, one he called “the Love of God”. And in early medieval
Europe, speech was seen as a vital sense, a gift from God.
There has never been any agreement about the ranking of the senses.
Aristotle put sight at the top, and followed it with each of the other senses according to
the position of their organ on the human body. Diogenes the Cynic, who went around in
daylight with a lantern, looking for an honest man, gave precedence to forthright smell.
And Pliny created a whole race with nothing but a nose on their faces, able to live on
scent alone.
Arguments continued until the Enlightenment, when animal senses in
general were discounted in favor of the intellect, and Descartes could bring himself into
being simply by thinking. But it was the English philosopher John Locke who dispensed
entirely with spiritual subtleties and laid the foundation for modern scientic studies of
perception, by insisting that it was through sensory experience that ideas reached the
mind.
Vision dominates our lives, our language and our minds. We say “I
see” when what we mean is “I understand”. We say “Look” when we mean
“Listen”.
But we seldom, if ever, experience any sensation in isolation. Our
senses feed on one another, shifting, sorting, reinforcing, blending as they go. Smell may
have been our first long-range sensory experience, but now all the domains overlap,
sharing common feeling-tones and recreating a primordial unity of the senses. And
strangely, nothing is lost in the mix. The separate senses are not so much diluted as
reinvigorated, giving someone like Helen Keller (blind and deaf) the chance to “see”
as well as any sighted person.
This is not news to poets, musicians and artists, who already inhabit
synesthetic worlds. Charles Baudelaire described “Perfumes as fresh as children’s
flesh, sweet as oboes, green as prairies.” Guy de Maupassant admitted, “I truly no
longer know if I breathed music, or if I heard perfumes, or if I slept among the stare.”
Percy Shelley celebrated “music so delicate, soft, and intense, it was felt like an odor
within the sense,” and likened the song of a nightingale to “field smells known in
infancy.”
All this poetic liscence is fun, but perhaps the best evidence we have
to suggest that there is a biological basis for synesthesia comes from linguistics. Joseph
Williams at the University of Chicago has analysed adjectives in English which refer to
sensory experience, and discovered what he describes as a “semantic law”, something
that helps us to understand how sense and meaning can change over time.
Going back twelve centuries, Williams found that there is a directional
flow in the transfer of adjectives from any one of the five senses to any other. Among
chemical senses, the flow goes from touch to taste to smell, but never in the other
direction. So a “dry” touch effortlessly slides into a “dry” taste, and even a
“dry” smell. Bat no adjective slides back down the scale to touch. Tasty words can
become odorous, but never tactile. Almost every adjective from touch and taste moves up to
attach itself finally to smell, but no known primary olfactory word in English has ever
shifted to any other sense.
Williams reports that the newer senses of sight and sound seem to show
a separate and parallel pattern of semantic development, receiving adjectives directly
from, and only from, the primitive sense of touch – as in “warm” colors or
“soft” sounds. But second-level transfers beyond sight and sound take place only
between each other, producing mutual overlaps such as “bright” sounds and
“strident” colors.
Williams has found this same clear pattern in Latin, Greek, High German
and Japanese, with word shifts in every case mirroring the sequence in which the senses
come into action in our lives. First touch, then taste, then smell, and finally sight and
sound. First the human infant turns toward the nipple, then it tastes milk, then it
recognizes its mother by her smell. Then, child and adjective all go on to the new
excitements of sight and sound.
It is fascinating that language evolves in much the same way as any
other living thing. And significant, too, that it finds advantage in being upwardly
mobile, mixing only with more experienced words associated with more highly developed
senses.
By Lyall Watson
From Jacobson’s Organ: and the Remarkable Nature of Smell
|