Sensorium
Encyclopedia
The term sensorium refers to the sum of an organism's perception
, the "seat of sensation" where it experiences and interprets the environments within which it lives. The term originally enters English from the Late Latin in the mid-17th century, from the stem sens- (see: sense
). In earlier use it referred, in a broader sense, to the brain as the mind's organ (Oxford English Dictionary
1989). In medical, psychological, and physiological discourse it has come to refer to the total character of the unique and changing sensory environments perceived by individuals. These include the sensation, perception, and interpretation of information about the world around us by using faculties of the mind
such as senses, phenomenal and psychological perception, cognition
and intelligence
.
, Edmund Carpenter
and Walter J. Ong
(Carpenter and McLuhan 1960; Ong 1991).
McLuhan, like his mentor Harold Innis
, believed that media were biased according to time and space. He paid particular attention to what he called the sensorium, or the effects of media on our senses, positing that media affect us by manipulating the ratio of our senses. For example, the alphabet
stresses the sense of sight, which in turn causes us to think in linear, objective terms: the medium of the alphabet thus has the effect of reshaping the way in which we, collectively and individually, perceive and understand our environment.
Focusing on variations in the sensorium across social contexts, these theorists collectively suggest that the world is explained and experienced differently depending on the specific "ratios of sense" that members of a culture
share in the sensoria they learn to inhabit (Howes 1991, p. 8). More recent work has demonstrated that individuals may include in their unique sensoria perceptual proclivities that exceed their cultural norms; even when, as in the history of smell in the West, the sense in question is suppressed or mostly ignored (Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994).
This interplay of various ways of conceiving the world could be compared to the experience of synesthesia
, where stimulus of one sense causes a perception by another, seemingly unrelated sense, as in musicians who can taste the intervals between notes they hear (Beeli et al., 2005), or artists who can smell colours. Many individuals who have one or more senses restricted or lost develop a sensorium with a ratio of sense which favours those they possess more fully. Frequently the blind or deaf speak of a compensating effect, whereby their touch or smell become more acute, changing the ways they perceive and reason about the world; especially telling examples are found in the cases of 'wild children,' whose early childhoods were spent in abusive, neglected or non-human environments, both intensifying and minimizing perceptual abilities (Classen 1991).
and cultural environments
of the individual organism and its relationships while being in the world.
What is considered a strange blurring of sensation from one perspective, is a normal and 'natural' way of perception of the world in another, and indeed many individuals and their cultures develop sensoria fundamentally different from the vision-centric modality of most Western science and culture. One revealing contrast is the thought of a former Russian on the matter:
As David Howes explains:
(1983, 1989) have focused on a critique of the hegemony
of vision and textuality in the social sciences. They argue persuasively for an understanding and analysis that is embodied, one sensitive to the unique context of sensation of those one wishes to understand. They believe that a thorough awareness and adoption of other sensoria is a key requirement if ethnography is to approach true understanding.
A related area of study is sensory (or perceptual) ecology
. This field aims at understanding the unique sensory and interpretive systems all organisms develop, based on the specific ecological environments they live in, experience and adapt to. A key researcher in this field has been psychologist James J. Gibson
, who has written numerous seminal volumes considering the senses in terms of holistic, self-contained perceptual systems. These exhibit their own mindful, interpretive behaviour, rather than acting simply as conduits delivering information for cognitive processing, as in more representational philosophies of perception
or theories of psychology
(1966, 1979). Perceptual systems detect affordance
s in objects in the world, directing attention towards information about an object in terms of the possible uses it affords an organism.
The individual sensory systems of the body are only parts of these broader perceptual ecologies
, which include the physical apparatus of sensation, the environment
being sensed, as well as both learned and innate systems for directing attention and interpreting the results. These systems represent and enact the information
(as an influence which leads to a transformation) required to perceive, identify or reason about the world, and are distributed across the very design and structures of the body, in relation to the physical environment, as well as in the concepts and interpretations of the mind. This information varies according to species, physical environment, and the context of information in the social and cultural systems of perception, which also change over time and space, and as an individual learns through living. Any single perceptual modality may include or overlap multiple sensory structures, as well as other modes of perception, and the sum of their relations and the ratio of mixture and importance comprise a sensorium. The perception, understanding, and reasoning of an organism is dependent on the particular experience of the world delivered by changing ratios of sense.
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
, the "seat of sensation" where it experiences and interprets the environments within which it lives. The term originally enters English from the Late Latin in the mid-17th century, from the stem sens- (see: sense
Sense
Senses are physiological capacities of organisms that provide inputs for perception. The senses and their operation, classification, and theory are overlapping topics studied by a variety of fields, most notably neuroscience, cognitive psychology , and philosophy of perception...
). In earlier use it referred, in a broader sense, to the brain as the mind's organ (Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
1989). In medical, psychological, and physiological discourse it has come to refer to the total character of the unique and changing sensory environments perceived by individuals. These include the sensation, perception, and interpretation of information about the world around us by using faculties of the mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
such as senses, phenomenal and psychological perception, cognition
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
and intelligence
Intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in different ways, including the abilities for abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, planning, emotional intelligence and problem solving....
.
Ratios of sensation
In the 20th-century the sensorium became a key part of the theories of Marshall McLuhanMarshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist...
, Edmund Carpenter
Edmund Snow Carpenter
Edmund "Ted" Snow Carpenter was an anthropologist best known for his work on tribal art and visual media.-Early life:...
and Walter J. Ong
Walter J. Ong
Father Walter Jackson Ong, Ph.D. , was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness...
(Carpenter and McLuhan 1960; Ong 1991).
McLuhan, like his mentor Harold Innis
Harold Innis
Harold Adams Innis was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory and Canadian economic history. The affiliated Innis College at the University of Toronto is named for him...
, believed that media were biased according to time and space. He paid particular attention to what he called the sensorium, or the effects of media on our senses, positing that media affect us by manipulating the ratio of our senses. For example, the alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
stresses the sense of sight, which in turn causes us to think in linear, objective terms: the medium of the alphabet thus has the effect of reshaping the way in which we, collectively and individually, perceive and understand our environment.
Focusing on variations in the sensorium across social contexts, these theorists collectively suggest that the world is explained and experienced differently depending on the specific "ratios of sense" that members of a culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
share in the sensoria they learn to inhabit (Howes 1991, p. 8). More recent work has demonstrated that individuals may include in their unique sensoria perceptual proclivities that exceed their cultural norms; even when, as in the history of smell in the West, the sense in question is suppressed or mostly ignored (Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994).
This interplay of various ways of conceiving the world could be compared to the experience of synesthesia
Synesthesia
Synesthesia , from the ancient Greek , "together," and , "sensation," is a neurologically based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway...
, where stimulus of one sense causes a perception by another, seemingly unrelated sense, as in musicians who can taste the intervals between notes they hear (Beeli et al., 2005), or artists who can smell colours. Many individuals who have one or more senses restricted or lost develop a sensorium with a ratio of sense which favours those they possess more fully. Frequently the blind or deaf speak of a compensating effect, whereby their touch or smell become more acute, changing the ways they perceive and reason about the world; especially telling examples are found in the cases of 'wild children,' whose early childhoods were spent in abusive, neglected or non-human environments, both intensifying and minimizing perceptual abilities (Classen 1991).
Development of unique sensoria in cultures and individuals
Although some consider these modalities abnormal, it is more likely that these examples demonstrate the contextual and socially learned nature of sensation. A 'normal' sensorium and a 'synesthetic' one differ based on the division, connection, and interplay of the body's manifold sensory apparatus. A synesthete has simply developed a different set of relationships, including cognitive or interpretive skills which deliver unique abilities and understanding of the world (Beeli et al., 2005). The sensorium is a creation of the physical, biological, socialSocial environment
The social environment of an individual, also called social context or milieu, is the culture that s/he was educated or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom the person interacts....
and cultural environments
Natural environment
The natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally on Earth or some region thereof. It is an environment that encompasses the interaction of all living species....
of the individual organism and its relationships while being in the world.
What is considered a strange blurring of sensation from one perspective, is a normal and 'natural' way of perception of the world in another, and indeed many individuals and their cultures develop sensoria fundamentally different from the vision-centric modality of most Western science and culture. One revealing contrast is the thought of a former Russian on the matter:
- The dictionary of the Russian language...defines the sense of touch as follows: "In reality all five senses can be reduced to one---the sense of touch. The tongue and palate sense the food; the ear, sound waves; the nose, emanations; the eyes, rays of light." That is why in all textbooks the sense of touch is always mentioned first. It means to ascertain, to perceive, by body, hand or fingers (Anonymous 1953).
As David Howes explains:
- The reference to Russian textbooks treating touch first, in contrast to American psychology textbooks which always begin with sight, is confirmed by other observers (Simon 1957) and serves to highlight how the hierarchization of the senses can vary significantly even between cultures belonging to the same general tradition (here, that of "the West") (2003, pp. 12-13).
Sensory ecology and anthropology
These sorts of insights were the impetus for the development of the burgeoning field of sensory anthropology, which seeks to understand other cultures from within their own unique sensoria. Anthropologists such as Paul Stoller (1989) and Michael JacksonMichael Jackson (anthropologist)
Michael D. Jackson is a post-modern New Zealand anthropologist who has taught in the anthropology departments at the University of Copenhagen and Indiana University and is currently a distinguished visiting professor of world religions at Harvard Divinity School...
(1983, 1989) have focused on a critique of the hegemony
Hegemony
Hegemony is an indirect form of imperial dominance in which the hegemon rules sub-ordinate states by the implied means of power rather than direct military force. In Ancient Greece , hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states...
of vision and textuality in the social sciences. They argue persuasively for an understanding and analysis that is embodied, one sensitive to the unique context of sensation of those one wishes to understand. They believe that a thorough awareness and adoption of other sensoria is a key requirement if ethnography is to approach true understanding.
A related area of study is sensory (or perceptual) ecology
Sensory ecology
Sensory ecology is a relatively new field focusing on the information organisms obtain about their environment. It includes questions of what information is obtained, how it is obtained , and why the information is useful to the organism .All individual organisms interact with their environment , and...
. This field aims at understanding the unique sensory and interpretive systems all organisms develop, based on the specific ecological environments they live in, experience and adapt to. A key researcher in this field has been psychologist James J. Gibson
J. J. Gibson
James Jerome Gibson , was an American psychologist, born in McConnelsville, Ohio, who received his Ph.D. from Princeton University's Department of Psychology, and is considered one of the most important 20th century psychologists in the field of visual perception...
, who has written numerous seminal volumes considering the senses in terms of holistic, self-contained perceptual systems. These exhibit their own mindful, interpretive behaviour, rather than acting simply as conduits delivering information for cognitive processing, as in more representational philosophies of perception
Philosophy of perception
The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world. Any explicit account of perception requires a commitment to one of a variety of ontological or...
or theories of psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
(1966, 1979). Perceptual systems detect affordance
Affordance
An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action. For example, a knob affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling...
s in objects in the world, directing attention towards information about an object in terms of the possible uses it affords an organism.
The individual sensory systems of the body are only parts of these broader perceptual ecologies
Ecology
Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...
, which include the physical apparatus of sensation, the environment
Natural environment
The natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally on Earth or some region thereof. It is an environment that encompasses the interaction of all living species....
being sensed, as well as both learned and innate systems for directing attention and interpreting the results. These systems represent and enact the information
Information
Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...
(as an influence which leads to a transformation) required to perceive, identify or reason about the world, and are distributed across the very design and structures of the body, in relation to the physical environment, as well as in the concepts and interpretations of the mind. This information varies according to species, physical environment, and the context of information in the social and cultural systems of perception, which also change over time and space, and as an individual learns through living. Any single perceptual modality may include or overlap multiple sensory structures, as well as other modes of perception, and the sum of their relations and the ratio of mixture and importance comprise a sensorium. The perception, understanding, and reasoning of an organism is dependent on the particular experience of the world delivered by changing ratios of sense.
Clouded Sensorium
A "clouded sensorium" is a medical term used to describe an inability to think clearly or concentrate. It is associated with a huge variety of underlying causes from drug induced states to pathogenic states induced by disease or mineral deficiency.Further reading
- "Sensorium." 1989. Oxford English Dictionary. J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, eds. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed 15 April 2005. http://oed.com/cgi/entry/50219915
- Anonymous. 1953. "Russian Sensory Images." In The Study of Culture at a Distance, Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux, eds. Chicago: University of Chigago Press. Pp. 162-69.
- Beeli, Gian, Michaela Esslen and Lutz Jäncke. 2005. "Synaesthesia: When Coloured Sounds Taste Sweet." Nature 434 (38). <http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v434/n7029/full/434038a_fs.html>. Accessed 15 April 2005.
- Carpenter, Edmund and Marshall McLuhan, eds. 1960. Explorations in Communication. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Classen, Constance. 1991. The Sensory Orders of 'Wild Children. In The Varieties of Sensory Experience. David Howes, ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pp. 47-60.
- Classen, Constance, David Howes and Anthony Synott. 1994. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London and New York: Routledge.
- Coté, Mark. 2010. “Technics and the Human Sensorium: Rethinking Media Theory through the Body” Theory and Event. 13:4 http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.4.cote.html Accessed 26 November 2011
- Gibson, James J. 1966. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Howes, David, ed. 1991. The Varieties of Sensory Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
- Howes, David. 2003. Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
- Jackson, Michael. 1983. "Thinking through the Body: An Essay on Understanding Metaphor." Social Analysis 14:127-48.
- Jackson, Michael. 1989. Paths toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- MedTerms. 3 January 2001. "Sensorium - Medical Dictionary." Accessed 15 April 2004.
- Ong, Walter J. 1991. The Shifting Sensorium. In The Varieties of Sensory Experience. David Howes, ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pp. 47-60.
- Simon, B., ed. 1957. Psychology in the Soviet Union. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Stoller, Paul. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Trippy, Dr. 2006 "Dr Trippy's Sensorium." This is a website dedicated to the study of the human sensorium and social organisation.