How It's Used

"Horror can steal into the mind via all the senses. There's the sound of the little meaningful chuckle in the locked dark room, the sight of the half a caterpillar in your forkful of salad, the curious smell from the lodger's bedroom, the taste of slug in the cauliflower cheese. Touch doesn't normally get a look-in."

—Terry Pratchett. Equal Rites. (New York: Harper, 1987, 2000), pp. 157-8.

“Somehow, though, these sensible stratagems are more palatable coming from Guiliano, who was once fat herself, and who now happily lives in America, where she first fell victim to our bad habits. She knows we eat too fast in front of the TV or with newspaper in hand, while French women make a ritual out of every meal. She knows we eat portions that are too big and food that is too bland. French women, on the other hand, stress flavor and variety over quantity and, therefore, are more satisfied with less. (Bland food and too much of one kind, a big bowl of pasta for example, breeds boredom, which leads you to alleviate it by eating more.) She knows our tendency to gorge ourselves on Snickers bars rather than savoring a single piece of fine dark chocolate. French women eat slowly and 'with all five senses.'"

—Julia Reed, “‘French Women Don’t Get Fat’: Like Champagne for Chocolate,” The New York Times, January 6, 2005.

“When someone calls your iPhone, you’ll know it; three out of your five senses are alerted. Depending on how you’ve set up your iPhone, you’ll hear a ring, feel vibration, and see the caller’s name and photo fill that giant iPhone screen. (Scent and taste will have to wait until iPhone 3.0.)”

—David Pogue.  iPhone: The Missing Manual. 2^nd Edition. (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2008), p. 36.

"Eating with chopsticks not only physically slows you down, but it also requires more concentration and dexterity and makes you think about the food. A Japanese food saying, "eat with the eyes" captures the essence of The Chopsticks Diet. Take a moment to look and contemplate, and above all, enjoy engaging all five senses of the sound, scent, sight, touch and taste of the food. It will make you appreciate and respect food more."

—Kimiko Barber, "Resolve to eat Japanese - with chopsticks," The Financial Times, January 3, 2009.

"We must also remember that machine brains in an intelligent network are different from human brains. First, human brains are not networked in anything like the same way. We know that human mathematical skills and memory capabilities are vastly inferior in performance: these are reasons for using computers today. We must couple this with the fact that, as humans, we think in only three dimensions (compared with multidimensional machine thinking) and have only five senses: it is estimated that humans sense less than 5 per cent of what is going on around them. Worst of all, humans still communicate using mechanical pressure waves — speech. Just how embarrassingly poor can they be?"

—Kevin Warwick, "Today it's a cute friend.Tomorrow it could be the dominant life form; A robot will be attending editorial conference at The Times today. Could it be editing the paper before long? Kevin Warwick looks 20 years ahead," The Times (UK), February 25, 2009.

Links

Related on eAlmanac
Second Sight
The Four Flavors
The Fifth Flavor
Sixth Sense

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on the Senses
This American Life Episode "about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste"

Product Links
A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman, (Vintage, 1991).
Take Five by D. Keith Mano