Noticing lxxxviii - senses

The other evening I was driving and listening to our local NPR radio station, KAZU. The program was "Says You," "a game of words and whimsy, bluff and bluster." One of the questions was about how many senses we humans have. Of course the answer was not five: sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste. That would be too easy.

Their answer weighed in at about 20. These include balance and proprioception (a sense of body position); perception of light and color (aspects of sight, but more refined); all the different qualities of taste: salty, sweet, bitter, sour, umami; pain; temperature (hot, cold); thirst (plasma osmotic pressure) and hunger (artery-vein blood glucose difference); and blood pressure.

Writing students are always being told to use all the senses. It's a fun exercise, in fact.

Here are a few examples:

Smell: Patricia Hampl, The Florist's Daughter

The flower shop was here and it was my father’s domain, but it was also marvelously other, this place heavy with the drowsy scent of velvet-petaled roses and Provencal freesias in the middle of winter, the damp-earth spring fragrance of just-watered azaleas and cyclamen all mixed up with the headachey smell of bitter chocolate.

Taste: Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. 

Hearing: Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. 

Sight: E. B. White, Charlotte's Web

In the hard-packed dirt of the midway, after the glaring lights are out and the people have gone to bed, you will find a veritable treasure of popcorn fragments, frozen custard dribblings, candied apples abandoned by tired children, sugar fluff crystals, salted almonds, popsicles, partially gnawed ice cream cones and wooden sticks of lollipops. 

As for touch, I'm not finding a decent literary example offhand, but I did run into a list of "209 words to describe touch—a resource for writers," so I'll just end with that.