It’s a commonplace that the impressions that your senses convey to you mediate your experience of the world you live in. To some extent each of us lives in a different universe: our senses give us data that’s just a little bit different and we each process that data just a little bit differently. I think of these slightly different worlds that each of us experience as the “sensory spaces” that we inhabit.
Some people have dramatically different sensory spaces than most of us and some writers have opened windows into these worlds. Helen Keller, known to most through the play and later the movie The Miracle Worker, lost both her vision and her hearing at a very early age and, consequently, lived in a very different sensory space space, indeed. Here’s a little of how she described her world in “The Story of My Life”:
I remember the morning that I first asked the meaning of the word, “love.” This was before I knew many words. I had found a few early violets in the garden and brought them to my teacher. She tried to kiss me; but at that time I did not like to have any one kiss me except my mother. Miss Sullivan put her arm gently round me and spelled into my hand, “I love Helen.”
“What is love?” I asked.
She drew me closer to her and said, “It is here,” pointing to my heart, whose beats I was conscious of for the first time. Her words puzzled me very much because I did not then understand anything unless I touched it.
I smelt the violets in her hand and asked, half in words, half in signs, a question which meant, “Is love the sweetness of flowers?”
“No,” said my teacher.
Again I thought. The warm sun was shining on us.
“Is this not love?” I asked, pointing in the direction from which the heat came. “Is this not love?”
It seemed to me that there could be nothing more beautiful than the sun, whose warmth makes all things grow. But Miss Sullivan shook her head, and I was greatly puzzled and disappointed. I thought it strange that my teacher could not show me love.
A day or two afterward I was stringing beads of different sizes in symmetrical groups–two large beads, three small ones, and so on. I had made many mistakes, and Miss Sullivan had pointed them out again and again with gentle patience. Finally I noticed a very obvious error in the sequence and for an instant I concentrated my attention on the lesson and tried to think how I should have arranged the beads. Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis, “Think.”
In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea.
In a world that she perceives by scent and touch alone Helen was still able to understand the abstactions that Annie Sullivan was attempting to communicate to her. It was just more difficult for Annie Sullivan to convey her meaning to Helen at least in part because of the differences in their sensory spaces.
How you process the data that comes to you can change your sensory space, too. I’ve written before about Temple Grandin. Temple is a remarkable woman with autism who has written extensively about what it’s like for her to have that condition. Here’s a snippet from the first page of her book, Thinking in Pictures:
I think in pictures. Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sounds, that run like a VCR tape in my head. When somebody speaks to me, his words are instantly translated into pictures. Language-based thinkers often find this phenomenon difficult to understand, but in my job as an equipment designer for the livestock industry, visual thinking is a tremendous advantage.
Other species live in even more dramatically different sensory spaces, different from our own both because of differences in the amount and type of sensory data they are receiving and differences in how they process that data.
Think of the incredible world of dogs, for example. Dogs hear sounds higher than the sounds that we hear. Dogs’ vision is better for perceiving motion than ours and not nearly as good as perceiving either details of shape or color. And the amount of tactile information they receive from their coats and whiskers, particularly in long-coated dogs must be truly amazing. What they feel in the motion of the air and the motion of nearby objects is hard for us to imagine.
But even more remarkable is the dog’s sense of small. Dogs have thousands of times more olfactory sensors than we do and devote thousands of times more neurons to processing that data. Dogs can perceive familial relationships in other dogs and people and can detect cancer and predict epileptic seizures simply, apparently, throught their senses of smell. We can’t even imagine the world that they live in. At times it seems like magic or extrasensory perception. But it’s just the very, very different sensory spaces they inhabit.
UPDATE: Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam.
