A Sense Of It All — PonoPlayer Review Section 1

Pietro Paolini - Allegory of the Five Senses - 1630 — Pietro Paolini – Allegory of the Five Senses – 1630

A Sense Of It All

Sound is a property of vibration. Sound is also survival – a sense that we cannot turn off. Sound shares traits with our other senses of smell, sight, taste and touch, but sound vibration is also very different.

Odor, the carrier of smell, enters through the nose. Light, the carrier of sight, enters through the eyes. Taste requires the mouth and tongue touching the item. These three senses can be shut down by simply closing & covering the input organ.

Covering your ears will alter sound but not totally remove it from entering your body because vibration enters your body in many more ways than just two ear holes. Those we call deaf can detect vibration, and in fact use it in place of information from the inner ear, to achieve similar or in some cases better hearing than those that use their inner ear.

The sense of touch is collected by nerves in the skin and therefore is more difficult to bypass, but touch requires proximity. Vibration does not require direct proximity because nerve endings in our joints pick up vibration and we cannot turn these off, or otherwise escape, from vibration.

Every hair follicle in human skin contains a nerve ending that detects changes in air pressure and vibration and reports directly to the same part of the brain that processes sound. An adult has about 4 million follicles on their body, each a tiny receptor like a microphone. This is *before* the skin is touched.

Proximity affects all of the senses. After all, they only exist to determine external stimuli.

Taste and touch require bodily contact, while odor, light, and sound all can be sensed from various distances.

But sound travels farther, clearer, and is less affected by weather than native sight or odor detection. This is why early communication methods used drums, horns and voice. Sound came first.

This combination of pervasiveness and remote pickup makes the case for vibration sensing being the most critical human sense.

Since humans are constantly seeking joy we have developed advanced forms of leisure to tweak our senses such as good food, massage, design, visual art, perfumes, and of course music. Ah music!

Specialists use the basic building blocks of human emotion to deliver amazing universal experiences through the senses. It’s hard to know where we’d be as people without these enhanced sensory inputs.

Music – highly organized sound – holds a special place among all human creations. It has been called the universal language because we have no evidence of a culture without music.

It is able to draw strong emotions out of us, perhaps more than any other art form, and cross boundaries effortlessly. Our full gamut of emotion is represented in song and music provides both motivation to accomplish new things and remembrances of past adventures.

Music is the straw that stirs the drink, so to speak.

Continue to Section 2: Stay Righteous & Stay Human >>

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