Making Sense: Kinesthesia.

摘要

To know anything well involves knowing ourselves well in relation to whatever else we wish top understand. Where does such knowing begin? At the beginning, perhaps? Here, Leela Zion serves as an able guide to the early stages of a lifelong journey whose full dimensions await scientific and philosophical investigation. - JK We learned when young that there are five senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. And even today most of the textbooks that deal with the senses still express this only five senses theory. We have many other senses, from the proprioceptive sensory system with receptors in the semicircular canals of our inner ears that tell us when our head is in motion and in which directions and planes it is moving, to senses involving feeling discomfort, vibration, and pleasure. Today, we recognize that the senses are systems. A sense is not just a nose or an eye or an ear or two, but each is a very complex system involving several different kinds of sensory receptors and interpretations. When Van Gogh cut off his ear, he could still hear with that ear. All he cut off was the funnel that directs sound waves more easily into the various sensory receptors in the rest of the ear complex. Hearing involves the onrushing and withdrawing of waves of air molecules that cause the ear drum to vibrate in various ways, and hence, the vibration of the hammer, anvil, and stirrup. These press fluid against the inner ear membranes with tiny nerve cells that send messages to the hearing center in the brain for translation. We can locate sounds in space and time, identify type, intensity, source, duration, and interpret these into song, talk, noise, laughter, or music. Seeing involves neurons that pick up light, images, duration, and color. Neurons pinpoint objects in space and time, and enable the eye to focus. We measure light waves and judge them, compare them and revise our interpretation of them. Through smell we can detect over 10,000 odorants, from minty, floral, ethereal, musky, resinous to foul and acrid. We have over 5,000 olfactory cells and 60 different sites of olfactory bulb surface resulting in spatial patterns or amplitude creating topographical mapping of odorants. Different olfactory neurons respond to different geometric shapes of molecules in the air and produce different olfactory responses and interpretations in the olfactory center. Smell can alert us to poison, or a prospective mate, or food. Smells can make us fearful or nostalgic. Taste is our most intimate sense involving actual ingestion of the environment. Groups of 10,000 or more taste buds are variously distributed throughout the mouth, responding to sweet, salty, sour and bitter. Thousands of combinational interpretations are made in the gustatory center of the brain. When we cut ourselves, we know where the spot is without having to look at it because of our sense of touch. We can feel wetness, pressure, cold, heat, pain, pleasure, and twinges. We have touch receptors in our hair follicles, between the dermis and epidermis, and in the deep tissues, responding to the slightest stimulation. We can feel the difference between a pat or a shove, a kiss or a bite, a feather or a thorn, a squeeze or a hug, a breeze or a gale. We can interpret heaviness, lightness, hardness, softness, roundness, textures, headaches, hunger pangs and thirst. The miracle of our sensory systems is that each in its own way can convert energy from the external world into signals for the internal world ... from physical and mechanical qualities of light, sound, energy, gravity, force, and inertia into living interpretations such as seeing, hearing, and moving. The world we construct is based on the information that our senses are able to perceive and transmit. We can extend our senses through the use of telescopes and microscopes, CAT scans, robots, satellites, amplifiers, machines, and computers. …