All our knowledge has its origins
in or perceptions, to the ancient Greeks sensitivity constituted the essential
difference between plants and animals, and between animals and humans. It was
not that anyone specific sense was better developed in human’s just one glance
at the animal kingdom will give examples of more acute vision (birds of prey),
hearing (dogs and bats) or smell (insects). Rather it was that between them
they provided a range of information that the intelligent brain could sift
through and use for the purposes of communicating, socializing, improvising and
inventing.
Every moment of our waking lives,
millions of sense signals from the eyes, nose, mouth, ears and skins are sent
to the brain most of which are never perceived on a conscious level. All these
signals are constantly being adjusted analyzed edited eliminated, even
completed by the brain. It is for example hard to find the blind spot in the
eye not because it is not there but because the brain fills in the missing part
of the visual jigsaw. The world of perception is very different from and much
more selective than the world of sensation.
Moreover, in adulthood, the
senses have a strict hierarchy, ruled first by the eyes and then by the ears
the distance senses of sight and hearing and only later by the skin, the mouth
and the nose the proximity senses of touch, taste and small. You can see how
this sensual hierarchy organizes itself simply by closing your eyes. What
happens? Your subjective inner world becomes filled with sound you can pick up
the rhythm of your own breathing and back ground noise, which you may not have
been aware of before, seems amplified. You do not need absolute quiet to
before, seems amplified. You do not need absolute quite to hear a pin drop when
your eyes are shut. If you carry this experiment one stage further and place
your hands over your ears, you will now find that sensation arrives
predominantly from your sense of touch.
You will suddenly become aware of
the comparative softness or hardness of the chair on which you are sitting, of
the texture of the clothes you are wearing and of sensations arriving from
different parts of your body, your neck, your back, and your shoulders even
your scalp. These are not new sensations they are continually being
communicated to the brain via the skin. The difference is that you have only
just begun to perceive them.
Further, we are all much more receptive to the
messages arriving from our senses than we, perhaps, realize although most of
the time we make use of just a fraction of their full potential. Think of the
virtuosity displayed by the piano tuner, who carries all the notes of the
scale I his head and can detect and adjust the slightest variation in the
pitch, or the discernment of the master of wine, who has educated his senses of
smell and taste to such a point of refinement that he can identify not only the
vintage of a certain wine, but the locality and even the vineyard that produced
it.
