As precise as no automaton ...
His friends call him Batman. Californian Dan Kish is blind, but that does not stop him from biking around town. Or to climb alone in the mountains. Snapping his tongue, he moves through the world and draws a picture with the echo, on which no lamppost, no fire hydrant and no curb are missing. Batman sees with his ears like a bat. And we, the seers, are astonished: we can barely have a glimpse of what our senses can do. But since we can look man in the brain, light falls into the realm of the senses: an Eldorado for medicine. Music, colors, smells, tastes and touches become remedies - even for serious illnesses. To use this potential of our senses, we must first understand how they work.
Let's grab a cup of coffee, thousands of sensors in the fingertips register how much the weight deforms the skin. If it does not meet the expected weight, the pressure on the cup wall is corrected within 80 milliseconds, so that the vessel does not slide out of our hands. Thanks to the sense of touch, we bring the cup to the mouth, not to the nose, and our lips are shaped at the right time so that they can pick up a liquid from this very vessel. The retina and olfactory cells have long identified the beverage as coffee, and the taste buds on the tongue and palate confirm the fact that they test temperature, consistency and tolerability, and give the stomach a command to provide digestive juice. If the milk in the coffee is spoiled, we spit the drink without thinking. Each time you re-grasp the cup, every time you swallow, all the information is updated - taking into account the changed situation in the body. The seventh cup of coffee tastes different than the first - the bitter note increases and signals us: enough caffeine.
Coffee drinking is such a complex process that our mind would be overwhelmed and therefore not bothered. Like riding a bike or skiing. Only the unexpected reaches our consciousness - the pedestrian, for example, who jumps in front of the car or the sudden silence when we live on a noisy street. In addition, those stimuli to which we consciously draw our attention. The church bells in the night fades away unheard, the crying of our baby on the other hand wakes us up. The senses are not only tools of the joy of life, but basically our connection to the world; they are our tireless henchmen, our personal guards - on patrol even when we sleep; they constantly allow us to switch to autopilot and yet operate as supple as no automaton will ever be able to do.
How exactly the interaction works, Scientists from different disciplines explore feverishly. For example, the sense of touch emotionally integrates objects into the body schema, which means that we can feel the tip of the ballpoint pen touching the paper. The artisan's hammer, the surgeon's scalpel become the extended hand. The external boundary of our body, the physical boundary of the ego, is constantly redefined. And not by the eye. Anorexics, for example, studies have shown, the body is defective, the self-perception deviates significantly from reality. Here are completely new approaches to healing. The sense of taste not only has receptors for the four known sweet, sour, bitter and salty flavors, but also a fifth, called umami, which identifies flesh taste. The diversity of taste perception, we understand, is not a luxury but a biological necessity. The sense of taste ensures that what we consume is also converted into energy, and ensures the balance of nutrients. Anyway: The receptors on the tongue determine our eating habits - a new approach to influence it?
The sense of smell, we already knew it, sparking past the mind directly into the limbic system of the brain, where emotion, memories and unconscious impressions are located. A sense whose supremacy must be reconsidered in the ruling hierarchy of the senses is the sense of sight. We believe what we see does not always seem like a good idea. Subjects at the University of Pittsburgh were asked to place their left arms on the table. The arm was shielded so they could not see it. Instead, the researchers put a rubber arm in front of the subjects with their hands. They should concentrate on them while the experimenter touched the concealed real hand and the visible rubber hand at the same time. Eight of the ten subjects later claimed to have felt the touch on the dummy.Faced with two possibilities, touch felt and touch, our brains trust the sense of sight more than the sense of touch.
So how reliable is our picture of reality? What is that? Reality? Here, too, we finally find the scientific evidence for what almost drives us mad in many a quarrel: Everyone has their own truth. Our picture of the world is highly subjective. If we put the arm in plaster, we suddenly see people plastered everywhere. When we are pregnant, we feel that all the world is just planting. Obviously, the purpose of the senses alone is to select the information that we need so that we can survive.
But sometimes we experience something which is not directly related to this steering, warning and control function. For example, we can smell the scent of a cinnamon bun, and a winter day of childhood sediment strata, long forgotten, unfolds in the mind's eye, clear and complete in every detail. There is the orange light of the kitchen, the palpable presence of the sisters, the feeling of Being small and safe. Or the first chords of a song, and the pain of a past love ties one's throat. Often we do not register the process consciously, but experience only so-called "attunements", are suddenly sullen, without knowing why. It is quite possible that only the head posture of a counterpart in the S-Bahn has unconsciously evoked the memory of an unsympathetic person.
It's like opening a door and a glimpse of a vast, ominous empire in which our lives are stored. Past, but also an enigmatic part of the present, of which we do not notice. Every sensory experience leaves its mark. Of many millions of information per second, we consciously perceive a maximum of 40, all others sink without detours into the depths of the subconscious. The unconscious never sleeps, it has already started its data collection in the womb and archived beyond it the basic experiences of humanity. It distracts us from the off. Because the unconscious is beside the mind the second system, with which we can produce actions. If Freud had compared the unconscious with a voluminous iceberg and the consciousness only with its protruding from the water, you know today that consciousness is at best a snowball on this iceberg. "The power of the unconscious about us is enormous," says neuroscientist Gerhard Roth of the University of Bremen. And our senses are the most direct line there - not only does the unconscious feed on them, but they are also the channel through which we can most directly contact ourselves.
A sexy thought, because not only our fears live there, as we believed for a long time, but also our creativity, ideas, motives. An inexhaustible reservoir that pays off. To immerse yourself in that, however, also offers to heal depression, fears, soul carnage. Without a word. The idea of manipulation is not new. For decades, department stores have been trying to encourage us to buy music by sprinkling music, and biscuit makers are researching the right sound when biting into the waffle for good reason. The curative power of sensory perceptions, however, has been dismissed by conventional medicine as a hocus-pocus. But studies now show that music in operations reduces the need for narcotics, that vocals in an Alzheimer's patient evoke memories that he or she no longer has verbal access to, that pain relieves pain and anxiety, fragrances reduce depression, and strokes preterm infants , We learn that soul states not only cause certain postures, but that certain postures can also suggest soul states that in turn affect one's state of health. Body feedback calls it, and body sense plays a central role here.
Our sense organs are the keyboard to a grandiose instrument. One we do not play well. We knock on some keys too often, leaving others untouched. Thus, we overstretch our hearing until the noise makes us sick, we are exposed to the flood of glaring pictures that put us under stress. Odor and sense of taste, however, we let stunted, offer the same scents and tastes and do so without dedication. We sting with pats and caresses.
It would not take much, just a little more attention - from the moment we open our eyes in the morning and register the first light, we devote ourselves to the body care bathroom, grind coffee beans and cut the banana for the cereal. There are endless possibilities for us to gain moments. The more we use our senses, the finer, the more skilled they become. The finer you are, the more enjoyable and healthier your life. What are we waiting for? Let's use them, our 2000 sensors at every fingertip, our millions of olfactory cells and several thousand taste buds. We can live this autumn so that the concentrated sensory power brings us well through a long winter.
