(28) Everybody its own, again (part 2)

This post is a follow up from (25), my first part on taste, a technological look of it.

The first part was all about the first sensation used for taste: visual. The next sensation used for taste is touch. This will be the subject of this post, still thinking of taste of course.

Inner human ear.

First contact, touch …

Did you see that?

I mean the picture of (25). As we have seen, excuse the pun, interpretation is primordial when it concerns the prime sense (visual). And then, like our baby of before, we want to touch, to feel what is going on in front of us. And we will see that in the meantime we are helped by our sense of sound to perceive our environment, even though we are not looking at it most of the time.

Sea, Sex and Sun

No, I am not diverging! I am going to speak about touch… and anyway this is not to be provocative, I just wanted to use another song title, this time from a well renowned French artist Serge Gainsbourg. He was provocative in his lyrics, and he was so good at it, so clever with words. Another thought was behind this title as well. I thought I might spice up this chapter because this might well be one of the less read of the whole anyway, so, why not!

So, the sea, and from the song title we can imagine the beach, a warm and pleasant temperature, the sun shining, the sand between our toes. Birds flying, people laughing, playing, everybody is relaxed. So good. What can we deduce from that?

Perception-wise we already discovered vision, and anyway we you reminisce you close your eyes to remember. You remember the sounds, these give a setting for the environment, but most of all you remember all the inputs associated with touch: the temperature is good, the sands is warm, the sea is wet, and so on.

So, what can we say about touch? Except that this seems complex as this gives a lot of information, we can say that this sensation is continual. This seems to be on a par with sight. However, because we analyse the sight first and the touch is only a reassurance on the state of the environment touch is only the second sense.

What is involved in touch? Well, we all know it, but we do not think about it in a conscious level.

First let see (!) what happens when you touch something. You apply pressure, and this gives information on its consistency:

· Denseness

· Thickness

· Weight

· Crumbliness

· Viscosity

and on its stability:

· Vibration

· Movement

· Balance

as well as its temperature and danger level:

· Heat

· Cold

· Pain

The other element of touch concerning the human body is its universal environment. By this I mean that touch is felt from all over the body and therefore give back information that is processed at all times. When you combine this with vision you already have a good feel of your environment, but when you add sound, you complement this notion with a perception of distance.

However, some sounds are easier to distinguish than others. This is due to the wavelength of the sound. While people in general will hear the medium range, and by this, I mean the normal sound produce when people speak, some other people will find difficult to hear “sharp” sounds. These are felt sharp are they are in the high frequencies. For some reason they feel sharper like a more focussed wave is hitting us.

The big difference with the opposite kind of sounds, the low frequencies, are that they are felt as being bass; like a normal guitar would talk to you and a bass will provide the emphasis. You feel the low frequencies as some kind of a larger wave, more like a vibration that could almost be touched.

One of These Days

You guessed it! Another song title, this time from my favourite band: Pink Floyd. I had the chance to get a ticket to one of their gigs at Lausanne, Switzerland, Olympic Stadium where they had to start early due to the local restrictions (can you imagine that some people even called the police to complain about the noise!). Anyway, the first real note of the show was from this song. And what a note. The effect what a sound wave that almost moved me, physically! Of course, I was not too far from the stage, but still. That was so powerful and bass that I could feel the vibrations through the structure of the stadium. What a moment, I will always remember that.

A picture is like a thousand words it is said. Therefore, you will find a visual description of an ear in this chapter. Do not look very far… just up!

You can recognise the outer part of the ear on the left hand-side, with the ear canal going inside afterwards. This stops at the ear drum. Then you have the middle ear. This is the most crucial part of the ear as it protects and helps the process of sound interpretation which happens in the inner ear. The inner ear is the snail like formation on the right hand-side of the picture that is filled with liquid. This is where the information is transmitted to the brain.

Human can perceive a range of sounds up to a certain point. We still have a huge range, but cats and dogs are able to perceive higher sounds. The best example of that is the many shows where dogs trained to shepherds sheep are controlled by their masters by whistling, or again a police dog can be controlled by a “silent” whistle. Bats are well known for their ability to use ultrasound as a sonar for echolocation, and some fish can perceive infrasound, low frequencies used in submarine communication as well.

The ears are responsible for balance as well, they give us a sense of spatial reference.

However, you do not recognise the origin of sound all the time. When you hear a plane or a helicopter in a city, you can be easily fooled into thinking that it comes from one particular place when in reality you need the help of your eyes to realise that the sound that you ear is actually coming from another direction.

Touch and sounds are two very important senses but by themselves they are not all encompassing. With the help of sight, and combined between them, they provide a rather clear picture of our environment and help to perceive threats. As for cheese application, we will see about that very soon…

And remember, as always, give life to your taste buds, and above all, enjoy real cheese.