Senses - Blog Posts
FOMO of the senses, pt. one
Blood rushing
Desiring our bodies to mimic what we do with our eyes… and our words
For it to feel a portion of what our souls sense
Of my senses, touch has FOMO with you
And is jealous of my other senses that are teased through our interactions
- pati3ntwo1f (081524)
While Listening to https://youtu.be/R7a6sr45YmE
While listening to ‘It’s You’
If we were to only get 9 minutes … this lifetime… only 9 minutes more of each other… I would spend 8 minutes and 29 seconds making this song our immediate reality, this rhythm the metronome to our hearts intertwining dance, these chords as emotional fireworks bursting in the splendor and beauty of our chemistry…
… and enjoying all else we give freely to each other…
And the last 31 seconds… I will spend holding you with endless intent, and infinite presence, and present purpose … and repeatedly whisper these words - gently grazing your lips with mine as I repeat -
“I’ve Loved You & Will Love You Forever. I Will Find You Every Lifetime. I’ve Loved You & Will Love You Forever. I Will Find You Every Lifetime. I’ve Loved You & Will Love You Forever. I Will Find You Every Lifetime.”
… until I’ve exhausted each fraction of our 9 minutes, …
and with your scent in my nose, your taste on my tongue, your voice in my ear, your aura in my sights, and your unmistakable energy surging over my flesh… I will begin my way back to you… again, and again, and again.
-Pati3ntWo1f (02082022)
The thoughts that explode like thunder and crackle down paths of thoroughness as meticulous and effortless and natural as lightning’s dance…
Our heat generates wind in this cold world, thus storms follow… however they are often misunderstood… for what is of nature is of nurture… and our innate nature is to nurture.
And we do… boldly, bravely, beautifully, bountifully…
Brutally…
Not in violence but sacrifice.
Cost is simply a question of what one is willing to give and …
I Give All To and For My Muse;
Thus we breeze and bellow and blow houses down, we mist and sprinkle and rain and pour and flash flood, we warm and bathe and tan and bake and scorch and smolder…
We still and babble and flow and splash and whirl and current and rapid and waterfall…
We speak without words and converse without hearing… we’ve evolved communication to a beyond, and then back to simplicity.
Seeing you was a novel with no title or chapters or page numbers or order - just worlds of words already known, and attachments of “if spoken or not”; welcoming me to unravel - now - what i’ve already know and grown to love…
Hearing you is the life of the imaginative mind, well prompted and eager to delve, connect, betroth, and ascend, … explorative and fanciful, detailed and connotative, genuine and beholding… our amplify, our soundtrack, our praise, our outcry, expression, our honesty, our pleasure…
Inhaling the nostalgia of times felt, but not readily known, the total body calming recognition of your essential bodily oils scent… the riveting, compelling, memorable, convincing, time bending accelerant that is “smells of you”… its welcoming, identity, intoxicating influence on all my other senses, its air - its 2nd to oxygen… its mix-ability, how it blends, transforms, transfixes with mine… how it evolves, elicits, enthralls and enchants as “ode de OURS”…
And Our Touch, our… feel, our gateway, our ascension, our vehicle, transponder, in-tune-ment, enhancement, limiter that we’ve made limitless - taking the most finite, transfixed, selfish of senses… and making it a vessel to the lost infinite, complimentary thus encompassing, selfless of the senses… our literal connection that bridges my energy to yours… and then we… hmmm… light up the sky and more…
Yet and still… tasting you is foreign and distant, reminiscent from your scent and vouched for by your touch and encouraged by the sight of you.. and although hearing falls deaf with pre-influence, it resounds and reverberates to be used as the result of… of my insatiability with tasting all of you…
Betwixt each kiss and lingering with each lick, enough within each suck and… Mmmmmm… sorry. Confidence within my Assurance is now lesser than the Eagerness propelling my Performance… my lightning dance, my natural nurture of you and us, my sacrifice, my smolder, my splash, my spoken or not, my outcry, my mix-ability, my energy to yours… the my in “Us”, the my in “Ours”, the my in “for you”…
And “We” still seem to exceed these enhanced basics, these connected selfishnesses, these overwhelming urges to reconnect and exist as we are… together & beyond
As…
We…
Are!
- Pati3ntWo1f (011122)
Using All of Our Senses in Space
Today, we and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the detection of light and a high-energy cosmic particle that both came from near a black hole billions of trillions of miles from Earth. This discovery is a big step forward in the field of multimessenger astronomy.
But wait — what is multimessenger astronomy? And why is it a big deal?
People learn about different objects through their senses: sight, touch, taste, hearing and smell. Similarly, multimessenger astronomy allows us to study the same astronomical object or event through a variety of “messengers,” which include light of all wavelengths, cosmic ray particles, gravitational waves, and neutrinos — speedy tiny particles that weigh almost nothing and rarely interact with anything. By receiving and combining different pieces of information from these different messengers, we can learn much more about these objects and events than we would from just one.
Lights, Detector, Action!
Much of what we know about the universe comes just from different wavelengths of light. We study the rotations of galaxies through radio waves and visible light, investigate the eating habits of black holes through X-rays and gamma rays, and peer into dusty star-forming regions through infrared light.
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which recently turned 10, studies the universe by detecting gamma rays — the highest-energy form of light. This allows us to investigate some of the most extreme objects in the universe.
Last fall, Fermi was involved in another multimessenger finding — the very first detection of light and gravitational waves from the same source, two merging neutron stars. In that instance, light and gravitational waves were the messengers that gave us a better understanding of the neutron stars and their explosive merger into a black hole.
Fermi has also advanced our understanding of blazars, which are galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers. Black holes are famous for drawing material into them. But with blazars, some material near the black hole shoots outward in a pair of fast-moving jets. With blazars, one of those jets points directly at us!
Multimessenger Astronomy is Cool
Today’s announcement combines another pair of messengers. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory lies a mile under the ice in Antarctica and uses the ice itself to detect neutrinos. When IceCube caught a super-high-energy neutrino and traced its origin to a specific area of the sky, they alerted the astronomical community.
Fermi completes a scan of the entire sky about every three hours, monitoring thousands of blazars among all the bright gamma-ray sources it sees. For months it had observed a blazar producing more gamma rays than usual. Flaring is a common characteristic in blazars, so this did not attract special attention. But when the alert from IceCube came through about a neutrino coming from that same patch of sky, and the Fermi data were analyzed, this flare became a big deal!
IceCube, Fermi, and followup observations all link this neutrino to a blazar called TXS 0506+056. This event connects a neutrino to a supermassive black hole for the very first time.
Why is this such a big deal? And why haven’t we done it before? Detecting a neutrino is hard since it doesn’t interact easily with matter and can travel unaffected great distances through the universe. Neutrinos are passing through you right now and you can’t even feel a thing!
The neat thing about this discovery — and multimessenger astronomy in general — is how much more we can learn by combining observations. This blazar/neutrino connection, for example, tells us that it was protons being accelerated by the blazar’s jet. Our study of blazars, neutrinos, and other objects and events in the universe will continue with many more exciting multimessenger discoveries to come in the future.
Want to know more? Read the story HERE.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
Yes, I see in color. Several years back I learned not everyone can, and there are those who don’t really see any images in their minds. We all think and recall things differently. I think that’s pretty cool.
Some attach other senses to memory, such as associating words with flavor. In other words, if you are a fellow synesthete your senses are wired differently.
Synesthesia. I like to think of it as a super power.
Brightly colored pictures
Move before my eyes
With no single reaction
Of my heart and my mind
Accompanying voices
I can't quite comprehend
My senses sense sensations
Which don't make any sense
Tastes and aromas. What a fun little chart!
Some people forget their sixth sense. Common sense! Did *I* forget about it? Nah, I just don’t *have* it-
Writing Characters with Enhanced Senses
Characters with extraordinary senses come up a lot. Maybe your character is of supernatural or alien origin, or maybe they were just born with a genetic quirk. Maybe they have a sensory disorder that only makes their hearing seem extraordinary. There are lots of reasons why a character might have extraordinary senses and a lot of different ways those senses might be put to use, but here are some of the drawbacks you might consider when writing a character who has a super sniffer, excellent eyesight, or high-quality hearing!
Sight: If your character has super sight, chances are that they can see farther and more clearly than anybody else, which is pretty cool except that the human eye can still only really focus on one thing at a time…so your character might want to be careful not to get distracted when they’re, say, crossing the street. If they’re watching a burglary occur a thousand yards away, they might not notice the car that just whipped around the corner behind them. Other super-drawbacks might include heightened sensitivity to light, color, or movement - and you have to remember that nobody can see three-hundred-sixty degrees at all times, so your character is probably going to have a blind spot (unless they’re an owl). Also, they may frequently look like they’re staring off into space when they’re really just watching something very intently.
Hearing: Have you ever been standing in a crowd of people who are all talking at the same time? Now imagine if you had super hearing! It can be hard to pick out individual pieces of information or even follow a single conversation when you can hear everyone in a six-block radius…and it’s not just conversations. You can also hear every car, every pet moving around, every jingle of a key, the air moving through the vents, and so on and so forth. This is another one of those abilities that may make it look like your character is just really easily distracted - it’s not that they don’t want to pay attention to their friends, it’s just that they’re playing “name that tune” with a radio four blocks to the southeast!
Smell: Think about your shower routine, whatever it might be. How many scented products do you layer on your skin? Soap, shampoo, conditioner, lotion, deoderant, maybe perfume or cologne, shaving cream or aftershave - the list goes on and on. If you had a super nose, you might be able to smell every single layer a person was wearing, and that kind of assault on the nose could be eye-wateringly overwhelming. Consider your reaction to someone wearing strong perfume! There are a lot of other types of smells in the world too, from cut grass and shoe polish to rotting garbage…and a lot of bodily functions have smells too: passing gas, excrement, or urine, menstruation, or sweating, for example. Your character might even be able to smell disease. This type of character might have to wear a mask or a scarf over their face to dull their super-sense, which might give them an odd appearance, but just imagine how much weirder it would look to be standing on a street corner sniffing at the air when all anyone else can smell is car fumes.
Taste: What’s the strongest flavor you’ve ever tasted? Maybe it was something fishy, or spicy, or sour. Everyone’s answer is bound to be different, but imagine if every single thing you ever ate or drank tasted that strong. Eventually you might get kind of tired of it and start preparing food that is more bland, right? Alternately, imagine if nothing ever just tasted like itself to you: you’re eating a french fry, but instead of tasting “french fry” you’re tasting potato, salt, oil, the metal of the fryer, the latex in the gloves used to scoop them into the paper tray, the paper tray itself…that would be pretty overwhelming! The major drawback to super taste is that your character might have trouble eating out or eating in front of other people. When you taste a lemon, your face puckers up…just think of how much more sour it would taste with a super tongue!
Touch: Did you know that every day you suffer a million tiny hurts and your brain just ignores them so that you can keep on functioning normally? If you had an enhanced nervous system, that might not be the case. Think about the number of tiny things we ignore every day: actions like walking, scratching, accidentally biting your tongue, or blinking could hurt pretty bad if you were super sensitive to touch! People with super touch might have a hard time getting comfortable all the time, and they might have to deal with not liking the feeling of clothes, being annoyed with air moving over their skin, or being extra-sensitive to physical contact. If a hug felt to me like someone was trying to break my ribs, I’d avoid them too!
So what are some things to keep in mind when writing about characters with extraordinary senses, other than drawbacks? Here are some things to consider:
Set limits. Your character shouldn’t be able to see past the curve of the earth - that’s just silly! Likewise, if they can hear something happening through the entire planet, you may want to rethink. Consider things like range and clarity when you’re setting limits on super senses: how far away can they see things and how clearly can they see them, for example. When it comes to touch, this is a little more tricky, and you might want to think more about the direct effects of pressure on the character: how much pressure does it take before it hurts?
Enhanced senses require enhanced brainpower. I don’t mean that they raise your character’s IQ level, but consider how much effort it takes to sort through and process sensory information. If your character’s brain can’t handle it, they might be in a constant state of sensory overload.
Speaking of sensory overload, that might happen to your character sometimes anyway! Everyone faces extreme situations in their lives where their brains just can’t keep up with the workload, and the threshold for that point is probably lower for people with super senses. If you’ve got a character with super hearing and four people are trying to talk to them at once, they might experience sensory overload and have to go recover for a while, so do your research into sensory overload and what to do to help them.
Finally, their super sense is going to impact how they experience and relate to other people. Maybe your character doesn’t remember a person’s name or face but they’ll never forget her voice. Maybe they just can’t even be in the house with Great-Aunt Helen because she always wears the same musty old perfume and it gives your character a headache. Maybe your character appears to be constantly zoning out when really they’re just looking closely at peoples’ jewelry. How your character perceives others, and how others view your character, is going to be impacted by their ability - count on it.
If you’re writing about a character with super senses, I hope that this has been helpful and maybe even inspiring to you, and I’d love to hear your thoughts too! Thanks for reading, and good luck!
-Kyo