MIND MOVES Marie MurrayIt takes loss to make us aware of what we take for granted. This applies to our senses: to our capacity to see, hear, smell, taste and touch. How we "make sense" of our world depends upon them. Existence is informed by the sensory system: consciousness by sensation, romance by the sensuous, emotion by sensitivity and the aesthetic by sensibility. We are sensate beings.
Senses are essential to experience. These modalities provide the pathways to the brain: the means by which we receive information vital to survival. Through our sensory system we process, order, interpret and negotiate all the activities of daily life. But it is when we lose capacity in any sense that we become acutely aware of how much we rely on the information that particular receptor conveys.
The senses operate at several levels. Sensation is not perception: to see is not necessarily to recognise what has been sighted. Sensation is also subject to deception. The eyes may deceive. Context may alter what we think we see. Market forces know the value of optical illusion: for example the elongated wrapper that makes the content appear greater than the given amount.
Hearing also requires the capacity to select and attend to significant sounds. Ordinary auditory life is complex given the loudness, pitch, tone and frequency of the sounds that surround us. Crossing a road while conversing with a friend, attention needs to be switched from chat to traffic. Survival depends on this selective attention to sensory material.
Many documented biological, psychological, educational and interpersonal problems derive from the pain of sensory overload: noxiousness of smell, fear of touch, excessive noise or the vibrancy of what is too intensely visual. While for those with the curious condition of Synaesthesia, stimulating one sense triggers another, so that you might hear colour and see sound.
Taste is practical and metaphorical. Think of people who approach life with gustatory gusto, consuming every experience with a voracious appetite for life. Taste requires receptors for what is sweet, salty, bitter, or sour on different parts of the tongue. The capacity to smell forewarns us of the possible flavour of a new food and as any good chef knows presentation is important in our enjoyment of what we eat. In this way the senses are cooperative, enhancing each other and compensating when one is lost. In this way sign language replaces hearing and poor sight is compensated for by touch.
As to that haptic world, the sense of touch: it is the tangible means by which we connect, reach out and are touched by other lives. Our first contact with the world is sensory. Volumes have been written about the importance of touch in emotional attachment and the dangers of cutaneous or tactile deprivation to the psychological development of the child.
Bonding is enhanced the moment the baby is placed upon its mother's body grasps at and is caressed by her, or held in its father's arms clasping his extended finger and "touching" the deepest core of parental love. Who could forget the pictures of researcher Harlow's monkeys clinging to a terrycloth mother for reassurance or depressed when deprived of touch?
But touch is not only the means by which we may heal but the means by which pain may be inflicted. Sensory deprivation may induce delusion.
Accident, illness, injury, disease or chemical intake can also confine, confuse or remove our capacity to construe the world accurately through the senses. There are many descriptions of what can go wrong from a neuropsych perspective. Among these agnosia (not knowing) means we may be unable to recognise what we see with our eyes or feel with our fingertips. Anopia relates to loss of vision, anosmia to inability to smell, apraxia to movement problems, while aprosodia involves being unable to understand the meaning of different tones of voice.
And can you imagine asomatognosia, which is to lose sensory awareness of one's own body? What is amazing is how much goes right, given how much can go wrong.
Conspicuous when absent the senses are more than physical receptors. They inform psychological interactions in fundamental ways woven into our vocabulary. We are "sensible". The absence of meaning is "non-sense". And so we see the situation and hear what a person says by attending to the deeper meaning behind his or her words. The sweet smell of success is more than olfaction. We feel for others, we stay in touch with each other. Life can be bitter. The sound of silence alerts us to capacities beyond decibels, to deeper reverberations that echo in the psyche. We not only hear what can be heard but our memories are evoked poignantly and starkly by the chance strain of a tune or a forgotten fragrance.
No wonder poet William Blake referred to our senses as life's five "windows of the soul". For they are the means by which we grasp life and reach beyond it to what we may imagine.
mmurray@irish-times.ie director of psychology St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview.
The series Touching the Glass presented and produced by Aoife Nic Cormaic is broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 at 8.30pm on Saturday evenings. It celebrates the senses with doctors, sculptors, musicians, chefs and writers and with extracts from novels, songs and poems.