[continued from the Last Post.]In creativity, the active use of all our senses is invaluable. They have the power to detonate as memories, and more so, as remembrances. Ideas explode forth from such mental activity because emotion in thought leads to motion in ideation.
Smell is the most direct of all our senses; nothing stirs our memories quicker than this sense. As Edwin T. Morris points out in Fragrance, ‘there is almost no short-term memory with odours.’ Just long-term memories. This is a major reason why smell stimulates learning and retention.
Morris goes on to state: “When children were given olfactory information along with a word list, the list was recalled much more easily and better retained in memory than when given without olfactory cues. Perfumes could be considered as liquid memory.”
Touch is a sensory system with unique functions and qualities; most importantly, it is the oldest sense and the most urgent. It can affect entire organisms, shape cultures, and the individuals that experience it.
As Saul Schanberg states: “Those animals who did more touching instinctively produced offspring which survived, and their genes were passed on and the tendency to touch became even stronger. We forget that touch is not only basic to our species, but the key to it.”
Taste is closely connected to smell, yet it is unique, and intensely personal. The word originates from tasten, Middle English for ‘to examine by touch, test, or sample,’ and further back, its roots spring from the Latin taxare, ‘to touch sharply.’ From a trial or a test, we are able to experience good taste and bad taste.
We can lose track of the logic of our lives when our sense of hearing is lost. In fact, the Arabic, ‘not being able to hear’ equates with absurdity. In mathematics, a ‘surd’ is an impossibility, and it is embedded in the word ‘absurd.’
"The five senses are the ministers of the soul.… Yet, the average human ‘looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking.’"
~ Leonardo da Vinci;
[To be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from 'Surfing the Intellect: Building Intellectual Capital for a Knoweldge Economy', by Dilip Mukerjea. All images in this post are the intellectual capital of Dilip Mukerjea.]
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment