As the zygote develops into a fetus, sensation emerges, gradually. Over time, sensation continues to develop and mature. This is the first part of Being we can value on its own terms – though a good, deep breath can satisfy, too – but then, that satisfaction relies on sensation. Each step in development makes us more fully aware, and human.

• When the sun of consciousness first shone upon me, behold a miracle! The stock of my young life that had perished, now steeped in the waters of knowledge, grew again, budded again, was sweet again with the blossoms of childhood. Down in the depths of my being I cried, “It is good to be alive!” I held out two trembling hands to life, and in vain would silence impose dumbness upon me henceforth. [Helen Keller, The Open Door (1957).]
• As the true method of knowledge is experiment the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences. [William Blake, “All the Religions Are One“.]

Helen Keller, who was deprived of sight and hearing, called herself a “phantom living in a no-world,” saying she lived in a “conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught or that I lived or acted. I had neither will nor intellect. . . I had no power of thought.” She lived as though at sea in a dense fog, groping its way without compass or sounding-line, until she learned to communicate with others who could “share” their experiences of a colorful and melodious world with her.

Our physical senses — touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell — and our sense of being in the world are our doorways to meaning. The smell of coffee on a rainy morning, the sound of rain on a roof, the warmth of a fire, the softness of a caress, the beauty of a sunset, the sweet taste of honey — all these experiences add richness and dimension to our lives. Yet even for one deprived of some of these experiences, the life experience itself — the sense of Being — is meaningful. Though she was blind and deaf, young Helen never lost her experience of being in the world. She may not have recognized where or who or what she was but she never stopped experiencing life, even though it was a life that often frustrated and enraged her. But then, we are all lost in a world we do not understand; most of us choose not to see it that way.

Of course, the senses developed in evolutionary history long before humans appeared but because this work is aimed toward human understanding, and proposes a framework for living ethically and spiritually, I will tell the story from our perspective.

The sentient life is a life of vital connections between ourselves and all that is external to us. We experience that life from within. That is what we call sentience. It is the principle that gives life its character, shape and meaning.

Every sentient life occurs in the world’s context. Even a person locked alone in a closet continues to sense. Though deprived of sight and sound, Helen Keller was able to smell, taste and touch. That experience becomes richer, more colorful and more satisfying as we emerge from our closet and build connections to the world. Among the most fundamental are the connections we build through our physical senses.

Today we “celebrate sensation” and the experience of Being, regardless of its quality. Our true narratives explore arts that best express each of the senses; scholarly readings explain the science behind them; visual arts use the medium of sight to explore each of them; and one composer’s music in particular, John Cage, best elucidates the sense of sound through music.

Each fully-dimensioned sentient experience has a character, quality, shape and contour, which we experience from within. Our commitment is to make those sentient experiences as joyful and meaningful as possible, for ourselves and others.

The ethical model proposed here does not include physical sensation in the core ethical system. However, ethics would not be possible without the physical senses. In that sense, they are predicate for ethics, and also for spirituality. The senses have important implications in the field of ethics: Each of the senses “opens up a portion of reality surrounding us”. [Piet Vroon, Smell: The Secret Seducer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), p. 74.] Sensory integration is important in preterm infants, autistic people and stroke victims, and in occupational therapy and pediatric occupational therapy. A brief survey of the senses follows next.

“Sensory-recruitment models suggest that imagery of sensory material heavily relies on the involvement of sensory cortices.” Findings by Mizuguchi, et. al., “suggest that corticospinal excitability during imagery with an object is modulated by actually touching an object through the combination of tactile and proprioceptive inputs” Schmidt, et. al., have applied fMRI imaging to the study of tactile imagery, concluding that “changes in brain connectivity support perceptual grounding of mental images in primary sensory cortices”.

“Brain-computer interface (BCI) has attracted great interests for its effectiveness in assisting disabled people.” “Topographic Somatosensory Imagery for Real-Time fMRI Brain-Computer Interfacing” is being used to benefit stroke patients and patients with phantom-limb pain. Physicians are paying particular attention to tactile spatial acuity in people with frozen shoulder. Tactile imagery shows promise in treating deficiencies in posture, blindness, pain and anxiety in joint replacement patients, and in activities like playing tennis.

Touch screen tablets can be used to treat persons suffering from dementia. Somatosensory intervention can be useful to people with cerebral palsy. Human touch is positively associated with compassion. Often it is healing and otherwise therapeutic. Some researches maintain that it can be useful in sexual therapy, with appropriate guidelines. A Touch Experiences and Attitudes Questionnaire has been developed to assess the effects of human touch.

Good eyesight is conducive to mental health, a sense of meaning and athletic performance. Visual contact with nature appears to improve mental health. Ophthalmologists address pathologies including myopia, glaucoma, ocular trauma, corneal disease, dry eye disease, uveitis, retinal artery occlusion, convergence and accommodative insufficiencies, blepharitis, lichen planus, scleromalacia perforans, keratoconus and many others. The physiological foundations of vision have long been under study. Abnormalities in the brain and overwintering in Antarctica can produce vision deficits. Cataract surgery, vitreo-retinal surgery, glaucoma surgery, electrical stimulation, and many other modalities can improve vision.

Hearing is a candidate for the most important of the senses, along with eyesight and touch. We can both see and hear danger coming, but we can hear and not see in the dark. Finely tuned hearing can detect a predator’s approach, a fire’s crackle, a rustling wind and distant thunder. It can also detect a loved one’s return, a child’s cry, a pet’s signal and an approaching marching band.

Hearing facilitates and adds depth to human communication: as with the body language and other non-verbal cues we see, we perceive not only what people say but how they say it. These physical and vocal cues are processed in many regions of the observer’s brain. Vocal cues facilitate understanding of the speaker’s confidence, likelihood of success in couples therapy, and decisions and outcomes in interpersonal interactions. “Listeners can extract meaning from non-linguistic infant vocalisations cross-culturally”. However, perception of emotion from vocalizations in culturally variable.

“Zebra finches are sensitive to prosodic features in human speech”. In moths, a courtship song can have two meanings.

Hearing also makes possible the appreciation of music, which facilitates self-discovery, stimulates brain activity, and activates a wide range of emotions. Non-human animal studies strongly suggest an evolutionary foundation for music. Music may enhance self-esteem. Music listening generates a wide range of emotional responses, and induces cardiac and electrodermal responses. Its effects on spirituality and on cognitive skills and academic performance are not yet clear. Music performance can activate the prefrontal cortex and facilitate social transformation. Music therapy helps build important neural connections, and therefore may be particularly beneficial in pre-term infants. It is beneficial in neurological rehabilitation, and treatment of acquired brain injuries, chronic pain, communication deficits in children, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, autism, schizophrenia, depression (see also here) and end-of-life palliative care. It can promote self-regulation, and also spontaneity, creativity and playfulness. Its possible benefits are being investigated in neonatal intensive care units. Music can generate feelings of happiness but even “sad music” can induce positive affective states, helping listeners to deal with depression and other psychological phenomena. Sad music brings the listener within the self, and activates spontaneous thoughts about the emotional aspects of life, while listening to happy music tends to place the emphasis on the music itself, with less mind-wandering. In the United States, music therapy dates back at least to the nineteenth century. This brief survey elucidates that music’s effects on the human psyche may be as complex as humanity itself.

Smell and taste are the chemical senses. The olfactory organ can distinguish several hundred thousand of the approximately 400,000 identified odors. The sense of smell develops in utero and progresses quickly in early childhood. It can alert us to the presence of a noxious gas (smell’s alarm function), rotting food or a decomposing animal. Less urgently, we can use it to detect poor personal hygiene, a full litter box or an item of clothing in need of cleaning. Smell can be a pleasure, as with a flower’s fragrance, a culinary invention’s aroma and the alluring scent of perfume. Along with eyesight, though perhaps to a lesser degree, the sense of smell conveyed a survival advantage in evolution.

Smell is essential to a good sense of taste. Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed that “smell is the sense of memory and desire.” “Episodic memory is often imbued with multisensory richness, such that the recall of an event can be endowed with the sights, sounds, and smells of its prior occurrence.” Memories evoked through smell evoke emotion more strongly than to memories evoked by verbal information. “Pleasant Olfactory Cues Can Reduce Cigarette Craving”. The sense of smell recalls memory through activity in the insular cortex and amygdala, and exhibits effects in Alzheimer’s patients, and human habitat and behavior. It is also important to the sex life (a mate has to pass the smell test) (see also here), motivation, learning, health, and feelings of well-being. Categories of smell include ethereal, aromatic, balsamic, musk, alliaceous, empyreumatic (burnt), hircine (goaty), repulsive and disgusting. Forms of odor memory change over a lifetime.The sense of taste is for fun but it is also related to nutrition and health. Its development begins in utero, and progresses in early childhood. Our human sense of taste was useful in our evolutionary history but our relative ease in procuring food has turned this sense into a mixed blessing. Early eating behaviors influence later food preferences. “Taste preference is an important determinant of dietary intake and is influenced by taste exposure in early life.” Researchers have not yet identified successful strategies for reducing the preference for salt. However, early childhood feeding strategies have been devised that successfully reduce the preference for sweets; repeated exposure to fruits and vegetables in infancy increases acceptance of those foods. Complementary feeding patterns can successfully increase the preference for whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and in particular citrus fruits. Babies who are fed infant formula are more disposed toward obesity than babies who are breastfed. Taste preferences can be shaped during those stages of development. The weaning period is “The One Time You Have Control Over What They Eat”. The culinary arts depend on the sense of taste, and also on the senses of smell (the aroma of food), sight (the visual appearance of food) and even hearing (sizzle).