What If We Had More Senses?
We all navigate our lives with our senses, stopping only rarely to appreciate how unique and interesting each one is. What is smell, after all? The ability to detect tiny particles that float out from matter and experience them in various chemical categories, such as sweet, fruity, and bitter? And touch? The ability to register the microscopic contours of matter and interpret them as a neurological feeling? When we break down what our senses really are, it becomes possible to invent new ones – an exercise that, if nothing else, introduces our imaginations to new possibilities. Here are three senses I’ve invented:
Enessence: The ability to perceive the amount of energy radiating from an object, be it heat, sound, sonar, electromagnetic, or any other type. You can enesce things through your clavicle bones, which encircle the bottom of your neck. One experiences enessence when close to an object that is radiating a lot of energy, or when the object is not close but particularly radiant, just as one experiences sound when one is close to a noisy object or the object is particularly loud. Because of the many energies emanating from the objects around us, enessence is often experienced like the bouquet of a glass of wine - as a smooth and complex combination of various energies. The feeling of enescing something can be described in tactile terms ranging from warm & light like a spring breeze to heavy & cool, like a lead apron. Intense enessence can cause goose bumps, shivers, or teary eyes.
Loftivity: The ability to interact with the happiness of the things around us. An almost liquid sensation, loftive objects hit our sensory channels like the smell of the salty ocean, flowing into tiny “loft buds” in the soft spots behind our jaw, leaving us stimulated for a few seconds. People or objects that exude loftivity do so in various strains (again like smells), which cause a minor tingle similar to electricity, or in other cases a feeling of dullness.
Camator: The ability to perceive the binary, or twin, of something on another dimension of time. This sense is closest to sight in that it washes us in sensory data about everything around us. Although our five traditional senses all aid in our survival, camator helps us in our immortal, or spiritual, survival, in that it shows us what things once were. When we camate something, we understand how it appeared before the absolute beginning of time, in a mirror image of our current concept of time. For instance, the camatorial perception of a flower in 2009 would display the essence of the flower 2009 years before time began, when only essences existed. Since camator is not physically similar to sight, the experience of camating the flower would not yield an image, but rather a feeling of understanding the flower better that might be described as spiritual fullness.
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Who knows - maybe some of these senses would come into being if we searched for them.
8 Comments
i feel happy about this
Wow,that is quite some imagination you have. Nonetheless a beautiful one. I get what you’re saying. We are so much more than who we are…It’s like I know something…but I just don’t know what it is yet.
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Intriguing Web site, Evan—thank you for being willing to open up some of your inner child so that others can more boldly explore their own. I am going on 50 years, but still very much in touch with the child part of me. Just discovered this site (as I’m contemplating teaching Peter Pan in a course sometime in the near future) and it seems to have tapered off since 2007, but the old posts are still fun to read and this one is a nice challenge to use our imaginations freely. I am minded of a resident cat in our local nursing home who always seemed to know when someone was near the end and would go and sit on the end of that person’s bed in his or her last hours—not a sense many of us would want to have perhaps, but I think animals must be able to perceive illness and pending death better than people do—something we’ve lost in our ever-more-hurrying society, perhaps. Animals are also often sensitive to humans’ vulnerability and find ways to protect babies in danger and to accommodate special needs of all kinds. So along those lines, I think Peter Pan types do have an extra sensitivity to other vulnerable souls like their own. I know I’ve always managed to find one or two childlike sympathizers in a room of “grownups.” I don’t know what I’d call that sense, but it is very important for our survival as adults. I feel like one of the lucky ones: I did manage to get a higher degree, endure counseling for “depression”, and hold down a series of real full-time jobs long enough to acquire some resources and credentials with which to navigate the game of adult responsibility; then in the last few years, I found a wonderful husband who lets me be me, a spiritual balance that reminds me when I’m true to my inner self is when I’m walking in the Light of God, and a part-time job that suits my various creative talents with minimum supervision. Who needs money when you have imagination? What I rarely tell anyone: I made a solemn promise to myself when I was 10 that I would never grow up, and I am grateful that I have been true to that ideal because I have deeper, more lasting friendships than most people and in that I find great happiness. I may not be as “successful” as society thinks I should be, and I am not always at peace with myself or the world, but I wouldn’t trade my choices for any “normal” path of life. I have no children of my own, but I relate really well to friends’ children as their fairy godmother. To younger PPs, it is possible to hold onto your wonder without getting stuck in reality. But you will need some skills and some friends to help you along this grand adventure. I think I just named that extra sense we all need to live a full life, not just survive: compassion. Peter Pan children have it in abundance; don’t let the ways of the world squash it out of you.
Love this idea. Not enough people pay attention to the senses. Thumbs up on my end.
And just a side note, your blog is beautiful, the ideas seem to bloom from a kind of innocence that no one has anymore, not even children. I think I might be a little in love with you hehe
Please don’t ever stop sharing your thoughts…
Hey Evan! Awesome article!
You can replicate something similar to your “Enessence” by implanting small rare earth magnets into your finger tips. The magnets are attracted to, as im sure you guessed, magnetic fields. Neat thing about this is that most things give off some sort to magnetic field, live wires for example. Only problem I can see with it is if you work around any metal shavings they would get stuck in your fingers.
Enessence. Interesting indeed. I suppose I actually believe in that. I always come across situations where I’m just sitting in the library at school, waiting for the guy I love. My head is down into my arms at the table, I close my eyes for rest since it’s still early morning. I don’t hear him come in nor do I see him. But as he walks up to me or briskly walks past me, I jump up from my arms. It’s like, yes. I did feel warmth right beside me. A warmth that makes me happy to feel every day. Then I think to myself- I sensed him.
I don’t understand some of this, (mostly the sciencey-bits) but I can understand the idea of different senses. I have Synesthesia, which is where the sensual parts of my brain get a little mixed up. Your Loftivity sense reminds me vaguely of the way I feel when walking in woods or through town, or something, like a spacial awareness. In my head, I can see all of time, and at the same time, it’s all around me (that might not make sense to many people) and I feel that that, and the way I see things, people, letters, numbers, words as having colours, makes me more aware of things like what’s around me, emotions, smells, tastes and sounds. I feel that truely, because some of my senses mix all of the time as well as being separate, that when they mix, they become new sense altogether.