Complex Numbers

In a Sense

"Did you know that butterflies taste with their feet?"

No, but I knew that butterflies taste horrible.

That's one of those things that you can only learn from experience. Oh, you can say it all you want, but unless you've actually zipped down the road on a bicycle, mouth wide open to gasp in the sweet spring air, only to suddenly have your cakehole suddenly filled with old shoes, industrial waste, aluminum, and ground fingernail, you probably think butterflies are magical flying flowers or something.

To be fair, there might be good-tasting butterflies out there. I know that some birds discriminate between the various species of fluttering insect, so, presumably, there are some that are delicious - at least to those birds. I have no desire to find out for myself; my taste buds exist for the primary purpose of discerning certain nuances in beer, wine and scotch, few of which sound particularly appetizing to the uninitiated. "This fine single-malt has deep flavors of oak, leather, peat, tobacco, and iodine." The challenge is to translate that into a phrase that might actually sound good to someone who's never had the transcendental experience of actually sipping whisky. Scotch aficionados, on the other hand, would be all over that.

Periodically, most writers have to be reminded to use other senses besides sight and hearing. One exercise from NaNo Prep comes to mind: "Describe a setting. Use all five senses." The result usually reads like an exercise in using all five senses, but it's good practice anyway.

Problem is, we don't have five senses. This is just one of the many lies they tell you in public school and, I presume, private school also. Well, not really a lie, actually - it's just that kids aren't exactly good at nuance and subtlety. One of them accidentally eats a butterfly, and it's all "Yuck! Hork! Patooey! Gross!" with no stopping to experience the full range of sensory experience on their tender palate.

The five "classic" senses - sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch - are really all just touch. Different specialized cells in the tongue and nose pick up on compounds released from the butterfly - or whatever - that brush against them. Hearing is the interpretation of rapid pressure variations in the air (or water); the sound waves tickle our eardrums, and a Rube Goldberg contraption of bone, muscle, and nerves interprets the result. Sight is similar, only with photons instead of sound waves. It's all, ultimately, touch.

Moreover, we have other senses than the classic five. A sense of balance, unrelated to the "touch" we learn about in school, is also unrelated to hearing - most deaf people can balance just fine - but relies on organs in or near the ears. There's the sense of proprioception, which is a fancy word for knowing where parts of your body are in relation to each other; you can raise your hand over your head, out of sight, and not lose track of it (we tend to take this one for granted, but it's a legitimate sense).

Some other animals have different senses, leading me to wonder whether a butterfly is actually tasting with its feet; perhaps it is smelling, or maybe it's using a sense we don't have a word for because we're not butterflies and our perception is thus limited. Sharks have at least three senses that we don't have, including the ability to sense electric fields, a feature shared with some other fish. Bats famously have hearing that's so sensitive that it might as well be sight for all practical purposes. Even common domestic cats (otherwise known as Our Overlords) have a sense that sort of combines taste and smell.

So yes, it's a good idea to feature the underutilized senses in writing. But if, like me, you're a fan of fantasy and/or science fiction, the real fun comes in making up different senses and attempting to translate them to our limited experience. How, for example, would you describe the sight of a species whose visual organs can detect different sections of the electromagnetic spectrum? Hearing that exceeds our own range of vibrational wavelengths? An eel following an electric current? The taste of a recently-discovered moon?

I know when I write, I tend to be movie-like - sights and sounds, with other senses mostly just available through dialogue or inference: "Ewww, what died in here?" Or a description of Our Hero's face twisted up after swallowing a shot of gin.

I should probably work on that.