It is 6:30 in the morning. As you can see in the photo to the left in Vitruvian Park, the pearl grey sky is streaked with varying shades of pink — coral, salmon, magenta. The trees are silhouetted against the rosy glow of the coming sunrise. The caw of a crow pierces the eerie stillness. Beauty is everywhere. I reach out and touch the smooth bark of a crepe myrtle. It feels almost like velvet, so soft and supple I can imagine its bright pink flowers waltzing down the trunk. The pure freshness of rain lingers from the previous storm. This morning I can truly taste joy in the air.
According to Alina Bradford’s Oct. 24, 2017 article “The Five (and More) Senses” at http://livescience.com, humans have five basic senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. The sensing organs associated with each sense send information to the brain to help us understand and perceive the world around us.
Touch
Touch is thought to be the first sense that humans develop, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Touch consists of several distinct sensations communicated to the brain through specialized neurons in the skin. Pressure, temperature, light touch, vibration, pain and other sensations are all part of the touch sense and are all attributed to different receptors in the skin.
Touch isn't just a sense used to interact with the world; it also seems to be very important to a human's well-being. For example, touch has been found to convey compassion from one human to another.
Touch can also influence how humans make decisions. Texture can be associated with abstract concepts, and touching something with a texture can influence the decisions a person makes, according to six studies by psychologists at Harvard University and Yale University, published in the June 24, 2010, issue of the journal Science.
"Those tactile sensations are not just changing general orientation or putting people in a good mood," said Joshua Ackerman, an assistant professor of marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "They have a specific tie to certain abstract meanings."
Sight
Sight, or perceiving things through the eyes, is a complex process. First, light reflects off an object to the eye. The transparent outer layer of the eye called the cornea bends the light that passes through the hole of the pupil. The iris — which is the colored part of the eye — works like the shutter of a camera, retracting to shut out light or opening wider to let in more light.
"The cornea focuses most of the light. Then, it [the light] passes through the lens, which continues to focus the light," explained Dr. Mark Fromer, an ophthalmologist and retina specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.
The lens of the eye then bends the light and focuses it on the retina, which is full of nerve cells. These cells are shaped like rods and cones and are named for their shapes, according to the American Optometric Association. Cones translate light into colors, central vision and details. The rods translate light into peripheral vision and motion. Rods also give humans vision when there is limited light available, like at night. The information translated from the light is sent as electrical impulses to the brain through the optic nerve.
People without sight may compensate with enhanced hearing, taste, touch and smell, according to a March 2017 study published in the journal PLOS One. Their memory and language skills may be better than those born with sight, as well.
"Even in the case of being profoundly blind, the brain rewires itself in a manner to use the information at its disposal, so that it can interact with the environment in a more effective manner," Dr. Lotfi Merabet, senior author on that 2017 study and the director of the Laboratory for Visual Neuroplasticity at Schepens Eye Research Institute of Massachusetts Eye and Ear, said in a statement.
Hearing
This sense works via the complex labyrinth that is the human ear. Sound is funneled through the external ear and piped into the external auditory canal. Then, sound waves reach the tympanic membrane or eardrum. This is a thin sheet of connective tissue that vibrates when sound waves strike it.
The vibrations travel to the middle ear. There, the auditory ossicles — three tiny bones called the malleus (hammer), incus (anvil) and stapes (stirrup) — vibrate. The stapes bone, in turn, pushes a structure called the oval window in and out, sending vibrations to the organ of Corti, according to the National Library of Medicine. This spiral organ is the receptor organ for hearing. Tiny hair cells in the organ of Corti translate the vibrations into electrical impulses. The impulses then travel to the brain via sensory nerves.
People retain their sense of balance because the Eustachian tube — or pharyngotympanic tube — in the middle ear equalizes the air pressure in the middle ear with the air pressure in the atmosphere. The vestibular complex in the inner ear is also important for balance, because it contains receptors that regulate a sense of equilibrium. The inner ear is connected to the vestibulocochlear nerve, which carries sound and equilibrium information to the brain.
Smell
Humans may be able to smell over 1 trillion scents, according to researchers. They do this with the olfactory cleft, which is found on the roof of the nasal cavity, next to the "smelling" part of the brain — the olfactory bulb and fossa. Nerve endings in the olfactory cleft transmit smells to the brain, according to the American Rhinologic Society.
Dogs are known as great smellers, but research suggests that humans are just as good as man's best friend. Research published in the May 11, 2017 issue of the journal Science suggests that humans can discriminate among 1 trillion different odors; it was once believed that humans could take in only 10,000 different smells.
"The fact is the sense of smell is just as good in humans as in other mammals, like rodents and dogs," John McGann, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in New Jersey and the author of the new review, said in a statement. The Rutgers study backs up a previous study at the Rockefeller University in New York, whose findings were published in the March 2014 issue of the journal Science.
Humans have 400 smelling receptors. While this isn't as many as animals that super smellers have, the much more complicated human brain makes up for the difference, McGann said.
In fact, poor smelling ability in people may be a symptom of a medical condition or aging. For example, the distorted or decreased ability to smell is a symptom of schizophrenia and depression. Old age can also lessen the ability to smell properly. More than 75 percent of people over the age of 80 years may have major olfactory impairment, according to a 2006 paper published by the National Institutes of Health.
Taste
The gustatory sense is usually broken down into the perception of four different tastes: salty, sweet, sour and bitter. There is also a fifth taste, defined as umami or savory. There may be many other flavors that have not yet been discovered. Also, spicy is not a taste. It is actually a pain signal, according to the National Library of Medicine.
The sense of taste aided in human evolution, according to the NLM, because taste helped people test the food they ate. A bitter or sour taste indicated that a plant might be poisonous or rotten. Something salty or sweet, however, often meant the food was rich in nutrients.
Taste is sensed in the taste buds. Adults have 2,000 to 4,000 taste buds. Most of them are on the tongue, but they also line the back of the throat, the epiglottis, the nasal cavity and the esophagus. Sensory cells on the buds form capsules shaped like flower buds or oranges, according to the NLM. The tips of these capsules have pores that work like funnels with tiny taste hairs. Proteins on the hairs bind chemicals to the cells for tasting.
It is a myth that the tongue has specific zones for each flavor. The five tastes can be sensed on all parts of the tongue, although the sides are more sensitive than the middle. About half of the sensory cells in taste buds react to several of the five basic tastes. The cells differ in their level of sensitivity, according to the NLM. Each has a specific palette of tastes with a fixed ranking, so some cells may be more sensitive to sweet, followed by bitter, sour and salty, while others have their own rankings. The full experience of a flavor is produced only after all the information from the different parts of the tongue is combined.
The other half of the sensory cells are specialized to react to only one taste. It's their job to transmit information about the intensity — how salty or sweet something tastes.
Other factors help build the perception of taste in the brain. For example, the smell of the food greatly affects how the brain perceives the taste. Smells are sent to the mouth in a process called olfactory referral. This is why someone with a stuffy nose may have trouble tasting food properly. Texture, translated by the sense of touch, also contributes to taste.
Five Senses Poem
A five senses poem follows a very simple outline of choosing a topic and then describing it through your senses.
According to https://literaryterms.net/imagery, the five most common types of imagery used in creative writing are:
Visual Imagery
Visual imagery describes what we see: comic book images, paintings or images directly experienced through the narrator’s eyes. Visual imagery may include:
- Color, such as: burnt red, bright orange, dull yellow, verdant green and robin’s egg blue.
- Shapes, such as: square, circular, tubular, rectangular and conical.
- Size, such as: miniscule, tiny, small, medium-sized, large and gigantic.
- Pattern, such as: polka-dotted, striped, zig-zagged, jagged and straight.
According to http://www.literarydevices.com/imagery/, below is an example from “1984” by George Orwell.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black mustachioed face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight.
One of the central conceits of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel “1984” is the all-pervasive surveillance of this society. This is a world that has its eyes constantly open — “Big Brother is watching you” is the motto of the society — yet the world itself is almost colorless. All that the main character, Winston, sees is “whirling dust,” “torn paper” and posters of a “black mustachioed face” with “dark eyes.” These sensory details contribute to a general feeling of unease and foreshadow the way in which the world appears more chilling as the novel goes on.
Auditory Imagery
Auditory imagery describes what we hear, from music to noise to pure silence. Auditory imagery may include:
- Enjoyable sounds, such as: beautiful music, birdsong and the voices of a chorus.
- Noises, such as: the bang of a gun, the sound of a broom moving across the floor and the sound of broken glass shattering on the hard floor.
- The lack of noise, describing a peaceful calm or eerie silence.
According to http://www.literarydevices.com/imagery/, below is an example from Robert Frost’s famous poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.
In this excerpt, there is a juxtaposition of two sounds: the bright noise of the horse’s harness bells and the nearly silent sound of wind and snowflake. While the reader knows that this is a dark night, the sense of sound makes the scene even more realistic.
Olfactory Imagery
Olfactory imagery describes what we smell. Olfactory imagery may include:
- Fragrances, such as perfumes, enticing food and drink and blooming flowers.
- Odors, such as rotting trash, body odors or a stinky wet dog.
According to http://www.literarydevices.com/imagery/, below is an example from “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” by Patrick Süskind.
In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease.
Patrick Süskind’s novel focuses on a character who has a very acute sense of smell. The novel, therefore, has numerous examples of imagery using descriptions of smell. This excerpt comes from the beginning of the novel where Süskind sets up the general palate of smells in 18th-century Paris. Using these smells as a backdrop, the reader is better able to understand the importance of the main character’s skill as a perfumer. The reader is forced to imagine the range of smells in this novel’s era and setting that no longer assault us on a daily basis.
Gustatory Imagery
Gustatory imagery describes what we taste. Gustatory imagery can include:
- Sweetness, such as candies, cookies and desserts.
- Sourness, bitterness and tartness, such as lemons and limes.
- Saltiness, such as pretzels, French fries and pepperonis.
- Spiciness, such as salsas and curries.
- Savoriness, such as a steak dinner or thick soup.
According to http://www.literarydevices.com/imagery/, below is an example from “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez.
On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food.
This passage discusses the character’s pica eating disorder. There are many examples of imagery using the sense of taste, including “a tear would salt her palate,” “oranges and rhubarb” and “the taste of primary minerals.” The imagery in this excerpt makes the experience of an eating disorder much more vivid and imaginable to the reader.
Tactile Imagery
Lastly, tactile imagery describes what we feel or touch. Tactile imagery includes:
- Temperature, such as bitter cold, humidity, mildness and stifling heat.
- Texture, such as rough, ragged, seamless and smooth.
- Touch, such as hand-holding, barefoot in the grass or the feeling of starched fabric on one’s skin.
- Movement, such as burning muscles from exertion, swimming in cold water or kicking a soccer ball.
According to https://softschools.com, Reginald Shepherd uses tactile imagery in these lines from his poem "To Be Free”:
It's winter in my body all year long, I wake up with music pouring from my skin, morning burning behind closed blinds. Dead light, dead warmth on dead skin
cells, the sky is wrong again. Hope clings to me like damp sheets, lies to my skin. As if I were a coat wearing my bare body out on loan,
accumulated layers of mistake and identity, never mine.
Test Your Knowledge of Imagery
1. Choose the best imagery definition:
A. A technique using descriptive details from the five senses. B. A way of seeing things in a new light. C. A way to describe a character’s emotions.
2. What effect does the imagery produce in this opening passage from George Orwell’s novel "1984"?
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.
A. Since the opening line is in April, this passage sets up expectations for Winston Smith to better his situation throughout the spring.
B. The contradictory details of Winston’s building being named Victory Mansions and it smelling of boiled cabbage and old rag mats creates a feeling of unease in the reader.
C. The fact that most of these details are unpleasant—the vile wind, the gritty dust, and old rag mats—makes the reader understand that Winston is a pessimistic man.
3. Which of the following lines from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” contains imagery?
A. The woods are lovely, dark and deep B. But I have promises to keep C. And miles to go before I sleep
Answers
1. A
2. B, While it could turn out that Winston is pessimistic, as in answer C, the objective details of the imagery in this passage don’t lead to that conclusion.
3. A
Comments