A Natural History of the Senses

by Diane Ackerman

  The explanation is remarkable. In the winter, tens of thousands of bees in a hive cluster closely together. The bees in the center of the cluster are warm enough when the temperature drops, but those in the outer layers get cold; they then begin to kick their feet and flap their wings rapidly—in other words, they act much as we do when we shiver with the cold. The main thing seems to be, though, that their agitation spreads through the entire cluster of 10,000 or more bees. The concerted efforts of the group eventually generates a sizable amount of heat. The temperature consequently rises until all the bees have calmed down, and then gradually drops until the same process is repeated.

  Again I remember that week in December when I traveled along the coast of California with Chris Nagano of the Los Angeles Museum’s Monarch Project, finding and tagging thousands of overwintering monarch butterflies. Hanging in radiant orange garlands from the eucalyptus trees, the butterflies would occasionally spread their wings wide like solar collectors, or quickly flap them to warm up before setting off to find nectar. It was easy to catch them in a net attached to the end of a long telescoping pole, and for the most part they just rustled quietly inside the net while we sat on the floor of the silent, insect-free eucalyptus grove. We lifted them from the net one at a time to check their health and sex and to see if they were pregnant, and then glued a small postage-stamp-like tag to the top of a wing. But some mornings it was as cool as fifty degrees, and a monarch needs the temperature to be at least fifty-five before it can move its flying muscles. Sometimes, when I finished tagging a butterfly and launched it into the air in the usual way—as if tossing a hankie—it would fall right to the ground, a tasty morsel for a quick predator. Whenever that happened, I would pick the butterfly up by its closed wings and hold it in my open mouth while I breathed hot air over its muscles. After a few seconds it would be warmed up enough to fly, I would relaunch it, and it would go about its delicate business in the grove.

  THE SKIN HAS EYES

  Touch, by clarifying and adding to the shorthand of the eyes, teaches us that we live in a three-dimensional world. We look at a photograph taken with someone we love at a small one-llama circus in a rural town, and remember the stickiness of that summer day, the feel of the llama insinuating its velvety nose into our shirt pocket, into our hand, under our arm, and around our chest, gently but irrepressibly looking for food. At that moment, the word “llama” becomes a verb in our vocabulary, because you have to llama your way through life from time to time. We remember the feel of the loved one’s hand, how his body curves, the texture of his hair. Touch allows us to find our way in the world in the darkness or in other circumstances where we can’t fully use our other senses.* By combining eyesight and touch, primates excel at locating objects in space. Although there’s no special name for the ability, we can touch something and decide if it’s heavy, light, gaseous, soft, hard, liquid, solid. As Svetlana Alper shrewdly observes in Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988), though Rembrandt often took blindness as his subject (The Return of the Prodigal Son, the blind Jacob, and others):

  Blindness is not invoked with reference to a higher spiritual insight, but to call attention to the activity of touch in our experience of the world. Rembrandt represents touch as the embodiment of sight.… And it is relevant to recall that the analogy between sight and touch had its technical counterpart in Rembrandt’s handling of paint: his exploitation of the reflection of natural light off high relief to intensify highlights and cast shadows unites the visible and the substantial.

  One of the things I find thrilling about Rembrandt’s portraits is all he leaves unpainted, for the eye to register but the mind to record in full. It isn’t necessary to paint anything but the front brim of a boy’s hat; the first dozen times you see the painting, you won’t notice that all Rembrandt painted was a gesture, the merest insinuation of a hat, which the viewer’s mind completes from its own experience. We have touched round. We know what round is when we see it. “Oh, that again, round,” the mind says once more, and looks for other fish to fry.

  What is a sense of one’s self? To a large extent, it has to do with touch, with how we feel. Our proprioceptors (from Latin for “one’s own” receptors) keep us informed about where we are in space, if our stomachs are busy, whether or not we are defecating, where our legs, arms, head are, how we’re moving, what we feel like from moment to moment. Not that our sense of self is necessarily accurate. Each of us has an exaggerated mental picture of our body, with a big head, hands, mouth, and genitals, and a small trunk; children often draw people with big heads and hands, because that is the way their body feels to them. There is so much to know at any given moment. “How are you?” a passerby asks politely in Kafka’s novel The Trial, and the hero panics, paralyzed by the shock of being asked one question he can’t possibly answer. Everyday life includes a host of similar questions, ones that aren’t meant to be taken seriously but are inserted into a conversation like a quarter into the slot of a mechanical horse, and I’m often tempted to give a lengthy and prankish answer. “How are you?” a friend will ask, and I’ll report straight from my proprioceptors on the state of my kidneys, nasal mucosa, blood pressure, cochlea, vaginal rugosa, digestion, and general adrenal unrest. Touch fills our memory with a detailed key as to how we’re shaped. A mirror would mean nothing without touch. We are forever taking the measure of ourselves in unconscious ways—idly running one hand along a forearm, seeing if our thumb and forefinger can bracelet our wrist or if we can touch our tongue to our nose or bend our thumb all the way back, feeling the length of our leg as we “ladder” our nylon from the ankle to the thigh, nervously twisting a strand of hair. But, above all, touch teaches us that life has depth and contour; it makes our sense of the world and ourself three-dimensional. Without that intricate feel for life there would be no artists, whose cunning is to make sensory and emotional maps, and no surgeons, who dive through the body with their fingers.

  ADVENTURES IN THE TOUCH DOME

  Going out to San Francisco, I open a not-to-be-opened-till-in-flight present from a friend—an exquisite blue-and-gold silk brocade box, inside of which lie two mirror-perfect chrome balls, each in its own silken socket. They bring to mind the mad Captain Queeg, who obsessively rotated two ball bearings while he spoke of pilfered strawberries. Inside the lid, a folded note explains:

  Ancient mandarins dating back 800 years believed these Chinese Exercise Balls induced well-being of the body and serenity of spirit. These treasured gifts were given to President Reagan and his wife while visiting the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese say that rotating the balls in the palm of each hand stimulates the fingers and acupuncture points, and improves circulation of vital energy throughout the body. Sports enthusiasts, musicians, computer users and health-conscious people everywhere consider them great muscle conditioners. Arthritis sufferers feel a decided benefit from this gentle but challenging exercise. Very effective for relaxation and meditation, Chinese Exercise Balls emit a distantly mysterious chime as you turn them. Beautifully handcrafted, 45mm. hollow polished chrome balls are perfectly weighted and fit comfortably into the average man’s or woman’s hand.

  Lifting them out one at a time, I marvel at their smoothness and slither, the ping they make colliding, and how relaxing it is to fidget them round and round, world over gleaming world in my hand. Actually, they look like rin no tan, specially weighted Oriental pleasure balls that a woman may insert into her vagina; when she rocks back and forth, the balls moving inside her give her the thrusting feeling of intercourse.

  Though a trifle arcane, this is a fitting gift for a trip to San Francisco’s Touch Dome, at the door of which I arrive a few hours later. At the far end of the Exploratorium, an extraordinary hands-on science museum, stands a three-dimensional maze through which one walks, climbs, crawls, and slithers in marmoreal darkness. The pliant walls give birth to you, or fall away to a sloping floor, or guide you to a sea of what feels like navy beans, or leave you gr
asping your way forward among rope hammocks. Now and then your hand strays over a familiar shape—a brush, a sandal—which seems as startling as a flash flood, and then you return to the indecipherable dark again. A few people get violently claustrophobic and start screaming, and then a guard sneaks in to rescue them, but even people who aren’t normally claustrophobic have moments of sheer panic when they wonder if they will indeed find their way back to the world of sight. The blackness is as perfect as solid rock, and the maze tumbles into slides too narrow to sit up in. You can feel the beginning of the slide and its rough dimensions, but not its length or how it might change farther on. How far will it plunge? Suppose you get trapped midway, unable to lift your head or move your arms? If you go arms-first, to feel your way along, suppose it narrows and you are unable to back up? Suppose there is a drop at the bottom into a soft surface, which you will enter headfirst? Down you slide, hands over head, somersaulting free a few moments later. Crawling into a room that seems to have no outlet, you stretch high and discover handholds, then climb blindly up and pull yourself to another level of maze. Something light and sticky brushes your face, the blackness becomes a solid mystery again, disorienting and full of blind alleys; the darkness pours its panic marbles under your feet and you stumble at speed into a quagmire of something dry but mobile that surges up to your knees; then, heart pounding, you trip through thick rubber fringes, grab hold, and fall down a ramp into bright light, having survived a small expedition of pure touch.

  ANIMALS

  Human beings may be voluptuaries of touch, but animals are the real touch masters. Sponges have a profound sense of touch; they feel every quiver in the water. Tapeworms are thought to use only touch to perceive the world. Insect-eating plants live mainly by touch. Cockroaches have paved appendages, called cerci, at the base of the abdomen, which are so responsive to vibration that the insects are frequently used in laboratory experiments related to touch. Snails have extremely sensitive feet. Alligators and crocodiles use the many touch receptors around their heads to engage in elaborate stroking and necking during courtship. Though one imagines a turtle’s shell to be without feeling, large sea turtles enjoy having their shells lightly scratched, and they can feel an object as delicate as a twig moving across it. Any animal that digs for a living, such as a prairie dog or an anteater, or must live by night, usually has a great sense of touch. The Eimer organ (a Pacinian-like corpuscle in the snout of a mole) can sense the slightest disturbances in the soil that might mean the presence of an earthworm nearby. The duck’s bill is very sensitive to water vibrations because its skin contains Herbst corpuscles similar to Pacinian corpuscles. A woodpecker uses its tongue—which also contains a Herbst corpuscle—to search for insects in the wood it has thrilled. Penguins must touch to survive—they stand on their parents’ feet and press close to their warm bellies—and so have developed a real passion for touching and being touched. Rats are compulsive touchers. Some aquatic animals can feel vibrations in the water over large distances, and detect with great precision anything moving in their vicinity. Touch is a powerfully important sense among animals, for whom the slightest touch of an object or another animal triggers responses. One need only watch the body whims of a house cat rubbing and wrapping itself around its owner’s leg, or the courting of two giraffes thwacking their long necks together. And many animals enjoy touch games for hours on end, whether it is two dogs, their tongues flopping, playing chase and tumble on the lawn, or a pack of teenage boys playing “touch” football in a corner lot.

  Folk wisdom has it that animals can predict earthquakes. Livestock are often reported busting out of their barns, household pets leaping from the house, pacing in a frenzy, or simply acting strangely before a tremor, which may be because of the static electricity in the air. As Helmut Tributsch, of the Free University of Berlin, realized, an animal’s skin is much drier than that of a human being. There is a lot of electromagnetic upset just before an earthquake, and this produces static electricity, which makes an animal’s hair stand up and quiver. I remember watching the launch of Viking II at Cape Canaveral in 1975, and how, during lift-off, the air felt itchy and electric. I felt bristlingly alert, because it was the first time in the history of our planet that we were launching a spacecraft to search for life elsewhere, and the sense of vigil deeply moved me. The launch itself produced an electromagnetic upset much like that of an earthquake and increased the static electricity in the air, which made my flesh creep. Even those skeptics among us viewers could not have been left unmoved, what with the hair standing up on their necks, the shock waves pounding on their chests like giant fists, their minds alert from the stimulating dance of negative ions, and the distant spacecraft lurching upward on spasms of apricot fire.

  TATTOOS

  Of all the skin-deforming arts, one of the most interesting and ancient is tattoo, which traveled like gossip over trade routes and continents. Neolithic farmers tattooed their faces with a design of blue tridents; female singers, dancers, and prostitutes in ancient Egypt wore tattoos. In 1769, Captain Cook reported in his journal that both the men and women of Tahiti displayed tattoos (a word that probably comes from the Tahitian tatau, “to strike”). King George V, Nicholas II, and Lady Randolph Churchill all had tattoos, along with souvenir-crazed Americans and fashionable Victorian women who wished a permanent pink to their lips. The Maori of New Zealand perfected an especially intricate style of tattoo, which Terry Landau reports on in About Faces:

  [They have] an elaborate tattoo technique called moko.… One traveler described a tribal chief who prided himself on having spared no visible part of his body: even his lips, tongue, gums, and palate were completely tattooed.

  Japanese tattoo, called irezumi, is a serious folk art like landscape painting or flower arranging, and great tattoo masters still perform their Chagall-like work in full-body tattoos that are subtle, repulsive, magical, seductive, sensuous, three-dimensional, thought-provoking, and macabre.

  Ultimately, tattoos make unique the surface of one’s self, embody one’s secret dreams, adorn with magic emblems the Altamira of the flesh. It is also a form of self-destruction; fully tattooed people live shorter lives because their skin can’t breathe properly and some of the inks are poisonous. Those with tattooed faces, hands, and heads have chosen, in a way, to seal themselves off from normal society forever, and so it is not surprising that the largest number of the tattooed in Japan belong to the underworld. Tattoo masters often help the Tokyo police identify bodies. A person completely tattooed in a single coherent scene dictated by body contour and self-image makes you wonder about symbolism, decoration, and identity. In her book of forty-six almost life-size Polaroid reproductions, The Japanese Tattoo, photographer Sandi Fellman explains her attraction to tattoos as an infatuation with paradox: “Beauty created through brutal means,” “power bestowed at the price of submission,” “the glorification of the flesh as a means to spirituality.”

  Just as westerners donate their organs after death, a Japanese wearing the work of a grand tattoo master may donate his skin to a museum or university. Tokyo University has three hundred such masterpieces, framed. To walk into this chamber of skins must fill one with shock and wonder: What a marvel to see so many lives at full stretch, defined by needles and ink, so many people who wished to become their own text.

  PAIN

  In the sand-swept sprawl of the panoramic film Lawrence of Arabia a scene of quintessential machismo stands out: T. E. Lawrence holding his hand over a candle flame until the flesh starts to sizzle. When his companion tries the same thing, he recoils in pain, crying “Doesn’t that hurt you?” as he nurses his burned hand. “Yes,” Lawrence replies coolly. “Then what is the trick?” the companion asks. “The trick,” Lawrence answers, “is not to mind.”

  One of the great riddles of biology is why the experience of pain is so subjective. Being able to withstand pain depends to a considerable extent on culture and tradition. Many soldiers have denied pain despite appalling wounds,
not even requesting morphine, although in peacetime they would have demanded it. Most people going into the hospital for an operation focus completely on their pain and suffering, whereas soldiers or saints and other martyrs can think about something nobler and more important to them, and this clouds their sense of pain. Religions have always encouraged their martyrs to experience pain in order to purify the spirit. We come into this world with only the slender word “I,” and giving it up in a sacred delirium is the painful ecstasy religions demand. When a fakir runs across hot coals, his skin does begin to singe—you can smell burning flesh; he just doesn’t feel it. In Bali a few years ago, my mother saw men go into trances and pick up red-hot cannonballs from an open fire, then carry them down the road. As meditation techniques and biofeedback have shown, the mind can learn to conquer pain. This is particularly true in moments of crisis or exaltation, when concentrating on something outside oneself seems to distract the mind from the body, and the body from suffering and time. Of course, there are those who welcome pain in order to surmount it. In 1989, I read about a new craze in California: well-to-do business people taking weekend classes in hot-coal-walking. Pushing the body to or beyond its limits has always appealed to human beings. There is a part of our psyche that is pure timekeeper and weather watcher. Not only do we long to know how fast we can run, how high we can jump, how long we can hold our breath under water—we also like to keep checking these limits regularly to see if they’ve changed. Why? What difference does it make? The human body is miraculous and beautiful, whether it can “clean and jerk” three hundred pounds, swim the English Channel, or survive a year riding the subway. In anthropological terms, we’ve come to be who we are by evolving sharper ways to adapt to the environment, and, from the outset, what has guided us has been an elaborate system of rewards. Small wonder we’re addicted to quiz shows and lotteries, paychecks and bonuses. We’ve always explored our mental limits, too, and pushed them without letup. In the early eighties, I spent a year as a soccer journalist, following the dazzling legwork of Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, and virtually every other legendary international star the New York Cosmos had signed up for equally legendary sums of American cash. Choose your favorite sport; now imagine seeing all the world’s best players on one team. I was interested in the ceremonial violence of sports, the psychology of games, the charmed circle of the field, the breezy rhetoric of the legs, the anthropological spectacle of watching twenty-two barely clad men run on grass in the sunlight, hazing the quarry of a ball toward the net. The fluency and grace of soccer appealed for a number of reasons, and I wanted to absorb some of its atmosphere for a novel I was writing. I was amazed to discover that the players frequently realized only at halftime or after a match that they’d hurt themselves badly and were indeed in wicked pain. During the match, there hadn’t been the rumor of pain, but once the match was over and they could afford the luxury of suffering, pain screamed like a noon factory whistle.