The Sences

The Senses

Nothing can excite the five senses quite as well as the sound of salmon leaping in the frothy water of a mountain stream high in the dripping forests of the Cascades. The smell of a skunk defending itself the only way it knows how. The sight of wild swans adrift on a mountain lake and the touch and taste of marshmallows roasted over a campfire also enliven the feelings. The use of each sense in the enjoyment of the natural world is the key to a deeper understanding of nature. Through our senses we can contemplate the earth's beauties and experience a sense of wonder and discovery.

The use of a remarkably complex biological process called the five senses creates a person's concept of the world around him. For example, Matlin writes that thousands of cilia, (hair cells) in the inner ear produce one's sense of sound (Matlin 275-276). These cilia tremble to the sound of high-pitched violins, swing to the beat of drums, and snap back and forth to the loud, clashing sound of a cymbal. Later, Matlin continues by noting that all the physical motion of the cilia excites nerve endings that send electrical impulses to the brain (Matlin 274). In the brain, the impulses are transformed into mental pictures which the brain later stores away for recall.

One's sense of smell, like the sense of sound, has the ability to provoke strong memories and reactions. This strong reaction to smell is believed to occur because the sense of smell is the earliest to have evolved (Kittredge 60). According to Kittredge, when one's nose takes in air that is laden with molecules of a substance, the molecules of the smell become trapped in the nose by a thin layer of mucus and begin to dissolve (Kittredge 61). Small cilia submerged in the mucus react to the dissolved substance and create an electrical charge. This electrical charge travels to the brain, which triggers a production memories and emotions.

Of all the senses mentioned so far, one's sense of sight allows one to perceive the world not only close up and personal but also from across the universe. The eye is an organ that has a retina and a lens to focus the light entering it into an image. Smith explains that the points of light stimulate the retinal cells and induce them to make electrical waves that arrive at the brain via the optic nerve (Smith 55-57). The brain translates this information and allows one to see the objects around him. Thus, one's eyes are lenses that form images produced by points of light reflecting off an object, and the brain analyzes the sense of the image into what one sees.

Like the other senses, the sense of touch also allows one to perceive feelings. The sense of touch allows one to feel not only a finger being caught in a door, but also a ladybug crawling up an arm. The skin, the biggest sensory organ of our body, George writes, produces the feelings which one calls the sense of touch (George 109). Thousands of receptors called Pacinian corpuscles, nerve endings encapsulated like an onion and moderately distant from the skin's surface The main sensations of touch, pressure, temperature, and pain produce the main sensations of touch, pressure, temperature, and pain (Smith 183). In fact, Smith estimates that

there are about 640,000 sensory receptors along with nearly half a million sensory fibers that enter the spinal cord (Smith 184). With so many sensory receptors, it is no wonder that the sense of touch