Structure of the Sensorium
55
The meaning of a sensation is something primary and biologically given.
There is no need to interpret the feelings of hunger and thirst, for example.
The meaning of a sensation is embedded in the sensation itself. It may be
said that a sensation is its meaning. Primary feelings are genetically given, and
constructed in the course of gestation just as organs are. They are “standard
equipment” in every animal body.
Thus, an organism comes into the world with a cluster of sensations and
feelings that it recognizes because each sensation is bound up with a meaning.
For an infant of any species, the first meanings are those associated with its
primary feelings. Hunger and thirst, the sense of hot and cold, touch, proprioception (feeling-knowledge of the parts of one’s own body)—all directly
carry meaning. The senses of hearing and vision develop gradually, because
they require calibration during the first days or weeks of life. As they mature,
the information they carry is especially rich in meaning, and brings critical
knowledge about the external world.
The innermost core of the Sensorium reports the state of our own body. We
are born knowing our bodies: That is, we know by feeling what body parts we
have and how to command the motion of every individual joint and articulation. Human infants may require several weeks or months to calibrate the
feeling of their body parts and how to control them—but many animals are
able to control aspects of body motion from the moment of birth. Using their
proprioceptive sense, organisms are likewise aware at all times of the way their
body parts and limbs are configured in space. Such body-feeling is a critical—
in fact indispensable—aspect of the feeling of being a self. Indeed, the core self
consists of the permanent background awareness of all our body parts and the
possible ways we can move them.
Most animals are alert to ambient sounds, and much of their knowledge
of events around them comes from their sense of hearing. As humans, we are
extremely sensitive to varied aspects of the sounds we hear: Their pitch, tone
color, timbre and so on. A three-month-old infant is capable of distinguishing,
for example, the sound of a doorbell, a particular musical toy, a tune played
on a piano, a familiar voice. An adult has the power to differentiate between
tens of thousands of different sounds and to recall and identify a great many
of them.
There is very little correlation between the quality of sounds as we hear them
and their physical properties as acoustic waves. Arthur Koestler, in his book
Ghost in the Machine explains at length how a great deal of what we hear is
simply absent in the physical sounds. The vast panorama of different sounds
as we hear them is a creation of biology, and does not coordinate with their
well-defined physical characteristics. Our power to discriminate all the sounds
55
The meaning of a sensation is something primary and biologically given.
There is no need to interpret the feelings of hunger and thirst, for example.
The meaning of a sensation is embedded in the sensation itself. It may be
said that a sensation is its meaning. Primary feelings are genetically given, and
constructed in the course of gestation just as organs are. They are “standard
equipment” in every animal body.
Thus, an organism comes into the world with a cluster of sensations and
feelings that it recognizes because each sensation is bound up with a meaning.
For an infant of any species, the first meanings are those associated with its
primary feelings. Hunger and thirst, the sense of hot and cold, touch, proprioception (feeling-knowledge of the parts of one’s own body)—all directly
carry meaning. The senses of hearing and vision develop gradually, because
they require calibration during the first days or weeks of life. As they mature,
the information they carry is especially rich in meaning, and brings critical
knowledge about the external world.
The innermost core of the Sensorium reports the state of our own body. We
are born knowing our bodies: That is, we know by feeling what body parts we
have and how to command the motion of every individual joint and articulation. Human infants may require several weeks or months to calibrate the
feeling of their body parts and how to control them—but many animals are
able to control aspects of body motion from the moment of birth. Using their
proprioceptive sense, organisms are likewise aware at all times of the way their
body parts and limbs are configured in space. Such body-feeling is a critical—
in fact indispensable—aspect of the feeling of being a self. Indeed, the core self
consists of the permanent background awareness of all our body parts and the
possible ways we can move them.
Most animals are alert to ambient sounds, and much of their knowledge
of events around them comes from their sense of hearing. As humans, we are
extremely sensitive to varied aspects of the sounds we hear: Their pitch, tone
color, timbre and so on. A three-month-old infant is capable of distinguishing,
for example, the sound of a doorbell, a particular musical toy, a tune played
on a piano, a familiar voice. An adult has the power to differentiate between
tens of thousands of different sounds and to recall and identify a great many
of them.
There is very little correlation between the quality of sounds as we hear them
and their physical properties as acoustic waves. Arthur Koestler, in his book
Ghost in the Machine explains at length how a great deal of what we hear is
simply absent in the physical sounds. The vast panorama of different sounds
as we hear them is a creation of biology, and does not coordinate with their
well-defined physical characteristics. Our power to discriminate all the sounds