Menu
Ordering of senses
Keywords; Attention, Selection, Intensity
Interesting quote:
Millions of items … are present to my senses which never properly enter my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to … Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought … It implies withdrawal from something in order to deal effectively with others. – William James
|
Commentry:
The imagination is a place where we can construct new worlds to experience, we can be guided there by literature, boredom, dreams or any other medium that allows us to forget our own sense of existence and inhabit a world different to our own. However, there must be some senses that we experience more easily, or, are easier for us to become immersed in. Initially, I pondered my own imagination and discovered that I found it easier to construct a mental image than to hear a song in my mind. More so, that when I did try and recount a song, the 'voice' singing was more my own than that of the performer. Having had this notion, I decided to consult Google's Ngram to see if there was any correlation to my experience that can be charted into graphs. to do so, I took the name granted each sense and created charts spanning fifty years to see how often each sense was reported in literature.
As it transpired, the order I had experienced through my own internal testing drew a strong correlation with the information I found on the internet. It would appear as though humans may primarily privilege experience in the following way; Vision, Audition, Olfaction, Gustation and Somatosensation. Now as someone who has studied English and the English language, I have to admit 'somatosensation' was a word I had not ever come across. Feeling that perhaps this may be true of a lot of people, I tested again using the terms 'taste' and 'touch'. As I expected, the ordering came differently, though this may be due to touch having a wider variety of use than taste in the English language (as you may see by searching the definitions of each word).
This research suggests to me that it is easier to become immersed when our attention is divided between senses of a strong reproductivity. By which I mean, senses that it is easier for us to reproduce and obtain a great likeness to the external world in our minds. When a person is trying to savour a taste they quite often shut their eyes to focus on that sensation. The same applies to music. More often than not, if we try to focus on something we try and reduce the amount of visual stimulus first. As such our immersion in external reality is achieved by the unity of all the senses even though some are selectively ignored when our attention is elsewhere. There are exceptions and at any one time any sense may override the natural order of processing and in doing so makes us immersed within different aspects of physical reality. Imagine you are watching a film and suddenly someone drops a kilogram of kippers on the seat next to you, it would not be long before the smell became your primary focus. Concludingly, it may be an apt summarisation to suggest intensity within the senses is the situation where physical reality creates immersion.