The Sensory Compounding Workbook

The five senses Your senses connect you to the world. Each sense organ takes in physical information from the environment and then sends signals to the brain for processing. How all this works is complex and there is a lot that is not yet known. We won’t get into intense anatomy, physiology, chemistry and all the other sciences that help us understand how our senses work. We don’t need to. What we need to know to create our own sense-ability is two main ideas. Senses are physical The first is that senses are physical. In other words, the smells, sights, sounds, touches and tastes that we take in are actual physical things like vibrations, light waves and chemicals. These physical senses developed to serve a function- to warn us, let us know what might be good or bad to eat, and many others that we’ll learn. Senses are more than physical The second idea is that sensory information also involves emotion, memory and thinking. The brain takes the sense signals and processes them in some really complex ways. We might have a strong memory of past holidays when we smell turkey. A certain color might make us feel happy. The sound of thunder might trigger a memory from childhood as well as make us feel afraid. These associations are what we’re working with here. They can change over time. The same physical sensation (such as a sight or a smell) can be experienced differently at different times.