A Natural History of the Senses
by Diane Ackerman
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Book Reviews of A Natural History of the Senses
Book Review: Sensing our feelings, feeling our senses
Summary: 5 Stars
Ever heard a song or smelt a perfume that took you suddenly and unexpectedly back to another time and place? "What is most amazing is not how our senses span distance or cultures, but how they span time. Our senses connect us intimately with the past, connect us in ways that most of our cherished ideas never could."
I've just finished reading A Natural History of the Senses, a book published in 1990 by Diane Ackerman, a poet and essayist who has gone on to publish two more books following the theme of this one. When I began I thought it as beautifully written and as profound as astronomer Chet Raymo's The Soul of the Night. Ackerman's book, like Raymo's, kindled my sense of wonder on almost every page.
It is a book in which I sense two underlying assumptions. The first, following Thoreau's Walden, that we (all living matter) are very much a product of our environment, and a lot of our physiology has evolved to interpret that environment to our brain. Secondly, that we are now so mechanised, mere technoslaves, that we run the risk of losing that vital connection: once we ignore those signals from our senses about our environment we run the risk of being alienated from it, and alienation is the first step to mental unhealth. The experience of using our body in its normal, healthy state is in itself pleasurable. It is good to remember that life is not all stress and interpersonal pressure, not a shutting out of unpleasant 'facts' by our various addictions. Life is naturally a joyous state.
So let's learn about our senses, but not in any conventional sense of learning, for this is not merely a compendium of facts about the senses but an attempt to encourage us to use our senses, to get us in touch with our feelings (sorry about the pun, but you see how close a tie our brain makes between our emotions and our senses).
The book is divided into five sections, one for each sense, with an epilog which considers the synthesis of the senses and the existence of other senses such as are found in some animals. There are some good thoughts on how unique each species' view of the world is, how particular to our own species is our 'reality'. It is mind expanding to imagine the world as seen and experienced by a spider, for instance, or a cat. One is a little more readier to accept another human's differing viewpoint, for one thing.
My edition was a well produced one (Chapman) with handcut pages, marbled endpapers, well-matched colours in the binding and an expressive jacket picture. It felt, looked and smelt enticing. (I love the smell of books).
"...the latest findings in physiology suggest that the mind doesn't really dwell in the brain but travels the whole body on caravans of hormone and enzyme, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalog as touch, taste, smell, hearing, vision." The brain we usually think of (the 'grey matter') is part of a system, the nervous system,which occupies our entire body, and which enables us to react successfully to our surroundings. Finding the balance between sensation and analysis of that sensation is hard for us because of our 'big' brain; it parallels what psychologists, following Jung, call the swing between extrovert and introvert tendencies, or what moralists see as the choice between intellect and hedonism. Have you ever seen a plant move a leaf or a blossom to face the sun? It is a graceful and beautiful action: for us finding such a balance between sense and survival is not easy, and other life forms have much to teach us.
We now study 'body language', unfortunately usually to find out how to make other people do what we want them to. But we respond to others' body language with our own, and much of what goes on goes on at a sensory level. Our much neglected sense of smell, for instance, tells us how others are feeling, gives guidance as to the dominance structure of a group and help us to find a sexual mate.
Ackerman's book is not a book on science, but a book that demonstrates what science is for.It is a book that I want to read again, soon. Much of the book's fascination comes from Ackerman's writing itself, the simple and direct style that reveals herself and her feelings as well as explains scientific findings and describes the natural world and human customs and history in poetic images and metaphors. Her lateral cast of mind can find the connections between humans and the world in which we live through mediators such as pheronomes, evolution, the behavior of Monarch butterflies, Cleopatra and Egyptian perfumes, the colour range of insects, the deer who come to her garden, the space shuttle and a thousand other fascinating examples.
Ackerman has done something I admire very much - synthesised culture, science, history and poetry to express a perception of human beings and their worlds. For those who've read this far, I've included my own musings to show just what kind of a book this is. If you read it, be prepared to have insights too. Also recommended is Isabel Allende's Aphrodite and those food films, Like Water for Chocolate and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman.
Book Review: A mixture of the memorable, the informative, and the banal
Summary: 3 Stars
Essayist and poet Diane Ackerman is probably best known for her wonderful New Yorker articles on her investigations of the animal kingdom (including extraordinarily memorable pieces on bats and penguins), most of which have been collected in books. In those acclaimed essays, her idiosyncratic and emotive musings transform the behaviors of other creatures to a human and humane understanding while avoiding anthropomorphic traps.
In "A Natural History of the Senses," Ackerman shifts her considerable observational skills from the animal realm to more familiar human territory. She divides her discussion into the five senses, plus a short section on "synesthesia"; in spite of the book's title, there's not much history involved. Somewhat like her essays on nature, each chapter includes random observations, anecdotes, and thoughts on the various aspects of the topic at hand.
Some of Ackerman's morsels are first-class, and she seems particularly to hit her stride in the section on "Taste." Her distinctive wit is on full display when she discusses the food endured by survivalists, such as a recipe for moose soup: "I particularly like the recipe's opening: 'You've just killed a moose.' It reminds me of recipe I read for stir-fried dog, which began: 'First clean and eviscerate a healthy puppy.'" Her book is a pleasure in such instances, when it reads like a turbo-charged entry of an encyclopedia, explaining "why polar bears are not white" or pondering the aesthetics of full-body tattoos or interviewing a human "nose" for a fragrance manufacturer or investigating the importance of touch for the healthy development of prematurely born infants.
What works for her essays in zoology, however, doesn't always work for a study of our own species; she sometimes writes as if she were explaining our everyday experiences to a race of aliens. Her prose especially sags when she reduces abstractions to a not-very-informative series of metaphors, platitudes, and non-sequiturs: "Sounds thicken the sensory stew of our lives, and we depend on them to help us interpret, communicate with, and express the world around us. Outer space is silent, but on earth almost everything can make a sound. Couples have favorite songs...." Even for a book on the senses, this is all a bit too touchy-feely.
Similarly, she has a tick of expanding a concept with a prose list of synonyms and puns that reduces our senses to the stimulations found in a thesaurus. Her several paragraphs on how "our language is steeped in visual imagery," for example, contain an interminable number of sentences similar to the following: "We quickly see through people whose characters are transparent. And, heaven knows, we learn for enlightenment.... Ideas dawn on us, if we're bright enough, not dim-witted, especially if we're visionary." I'm not sure I "see" the point of these lengthy and repetitive passages.
Overall, the book is certainly worth mining for its liberally scattered gems, but at times I found it tedious and simplistic as a cover-to-cover read.
Book Review: A sense treasure
Summary: 5 Stars
Being profoundly interested in the human experience I was drawn to the writing of Diane Ackerman and A Natural History of Senses. I went into the read with an open, willing mind, prepared to further understand our five senses. Certainly I was not disappointed, as Ackerman delivered a treasure; poetically diving head first into the sense of smell, touch, taste, hearing, and vision. Ackerman leaves the reader with room to wonder as she lightly dotes on each of the senses without overfilling the reader. She tells the story from the point of view of an active observer and an experience-filled individual. The reader wants to believe and soak in what she writes.
She provides surprising facts, "we can detect over ten thousand odors" for the reader to ponder. In other moments she will mix fact with grand narrative, "music, the perfume of hearing, probably began as a religious act to arouse groups of people." She then might turn and reinforce facts with a personal tidbit, "scuba diving in the Bahamas some years ago, I became aware of two things..." which makes the facts come to life for the reader. Ackerman is brilliant in her mix of personal experiences, rich narrative and interesting trivia. She even throws in a recipe in the footnotes!
One section in the chapter of touch, Adventures in the Touch Dome, is so well done it is as if Ackerman took a video camera through the Exploratorium she was describing and gave the footage verbatim back to the reader. I could almost feel what she was describing. In Ackerman's own words, "the pliant walls give birth to you...or guide you to a sea of what feels like navy beans, or leave you grasping your way forward among rope hammocks." But to be honest the chapter of the mute sense of smell drew me in the furthest. Ackerman appeared the most passionate here; almost seeming to need to defend smell as an under-appreciated sense.
Throughout reading this book, I caught myself thinking of a Cirque de Sol performance. They are masters at engaging the senses. As Ackerman teaches they are not the only ones, "real estate dealers sometimes spray "cake-baking" aromas around the kitchen of a house before showing it to a client." She describes the job of perfumers in how they attract different types of clientele. Certainly it is smart business to positively engage the buyer's senses.
Overall this is a five star book from my viewpoint. Informative, pleasurable, poetic, entertaining are all apt descriptors. I think the major strength of this book was the intention put forth. My imagination tells me Ackerman could have written a book of this size on any one of the senses so if there is a critique it is that some of the sections stop short of fulfilling all the readers needs to understand a particular sense. Ackerman does not try to tell the reader all about the sense of smell or any of the other sense rather she dips a stick in sugar and lets you have a little sample of each, well done.
Book Review: Climb aboard "The Magic Schoolbus"....for adults!
Summary: 5 Stars
Do you remember the day in second grade when your teacher taught the lesson of the five senses? You felt around for some mysterious object in a brown paper bag for touch, you had lemon squeezed on your tongue for taste, you made Styrofoam cup telephones for hearing, you shut your eyes and stumbled around "blind" clinging to the arm of the kid next to you for sight, and you sniffed mothballs for smell. That was about it, subject covered. Now, just imagine if you could learn the lesson over again with the zany fictional teacher Ms. Frizzle of "The Magic Schoolbus" fame, except this time she's teaching adults. Welcome to the world of Diane Ackerman. In a Natural History of The Senses Ms. Ackerman enthusiastically, patiently, and most of all exuberantly reintroduces us to the sensual world from her perspective and shows us how it is so much more alive and kicking than what we learned in grade school.This book is still broken down into five familiar sections of smell, touch, taste, hearing and vision, but in total it is so chock full of intimate detail of the world the reader can't help but see things in a different light for having read it. It is written with the intelligence of a scholar, the fluidity and grace of a poet, and well, as I've mentioned above the enthusiasm of the one and only Ms. Frizzle (and I mean this as the nicest compliment!) This book will certainly appeal to people who love detail as it is well referenced for those wishing to delve deeper into the literature of the senses. Diane Ackerman shares, teaches and reminds us of some of the most simple things in life. Do you know how a butterfly "tastes" sweetness? Can you explain the electrical significance of the corpuscles strategically placed throughout your own body responsible for great sex? If you are saying "so what?" then I ask that you just give it a try. It is a fun romp of a read that may take you places you haven't been for a long time. A good portion of the book is written in the first person, where the author has juxtaposed what she knows with how she lives, and I believe her detractors would comment that she appears self-absorbed for it. Just get over that and realize at the very last she reminds us life can be steered away from its sometimes predictable, even boring, path by something as seemingly insignificant as adding an extra teaspoon of vanilla to the muffin batter. Who knows, you may even dab some on your pulse points and let the rest of the world wonder why you smell so...exuberant. I'm sure Diane Ackerman would expect nothing less.
Book Review: A welcome feast for the senses
Summary: 5 Stars
{Review writte in July 2004}
I read A Natural History of the Senses back in 1991, when it first came out ...
If you're an aspiring writer, if you enjoy meditation and/or sensory deprivation (or other activities designed to heighten your sensory awareness), or even if you're just an unpracticed closet sensualist eager for new experiences, then do not walk ... RUN ... run out and by this book. Better still, click on our "Buy Books" link, locate it, and select overnight shipment. You'll thank me for it.
Yes, it really is THAT good.
Ackerman gives us a first hand tour de force overview of our 5 bodily senses, from the historical, scientific, philosophical, artistic and literary vantagepoints. With the giddy delight of someone with a rapt attention for fine details, not to mention a true gift for words, she takes us on a rich journey of the subtle and the sublime ... from the musky scent of fire-warmed leather, to the plaintive cry of a lonely loon hidden in the misty wilderness, to the rousing plushness of crushed velvet, to the crisp-tart taste of muscat grapes plucked straight from their sun-ripened vines.
No need for me to wax poetic, because that's what this work is all about ... it's a master class in understanding the senses we use to percieve the world itself.
Sure, there are people out there who think that books like this are just lightweight literary fluff ... such people reveal themselves to be the same undiscerning people who are blindly content to live on fast food slop, who never stop to relax and fully appreciate a beautiful sunset, and who mechanically motor off into the rat race without pausing for a long moment to nuzzle in the musky warmth of their lover's neck and hair, and to beam love for a long languid moment into their mate's eyes. For those cannot appreciate the subtleties such things, I feel nothing but pity. Go right ahead and wallow in your detached mediocrity ... and whatever you do, do NOT buy this book, because it'll only upset you to realize all the things you've been missing out on all these years. You've been living your life in the lowest possible resolution, and you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Anyway, this book is easily one of the most enjoyable and satisfying books I've read to date.