The end at last!

Come along!

RB3 - It's the End of the World as We Know It by... by XxIronManxX1

More sense and sensibility

Have you ever stopped to consider how common sense is, and what the world would be like without it?

Well, it may come as a surprise but the low down on sense is that it is not. Not common that is. In fact it would seem as if something as simple as a mutually shared sensory experience is just about the last thing we can expect.

You see, people observe the world they find according to the heuristic control of everything they believe to know. Simply put it means that people see what they expect, and the same holds true for pretty much all the commonly known senses.

Besides the fact that this innate ability is the reason for the infuriating futility of entertaining something as empty as jealousy, it also means that most of us would probably ignore the alien spacecraft that landed in our back yard, just because they don't.

And in defense of my argument on the absence of mutual sense I would like to submit into evidence the historical account of Columbus, from the native population's point of view.

The story goes that three days after Columbus dropped anchor and sails in the bay of the promised land, the native elders told of a strange dream they had. A vision that told of a massive white bird that would beach, and of strange men with strange clothes and strange customs that would step from it's fold.

It was shortly after they shared their “dream vision” that people started to notice the ships that lay anchor in plain sight for the last couple of days. Such is the power of our innate heuristic control, believe it or not.

And by a similar stroke of blind luck it would seem that we actually do not need to share such detail to communicate and grow. With half of it done it only remains to be told in the truth we behold…

I say who cares if it is common or not, the value of a picture without it’s emotional content is pretty obscure if you compare it to the full frontal quadraphonic kind, splendant and replete with enhanced 3D emotional content natively embedded.

Arrr me mateys, ahoy!

Wake up and smell the roses

If you are like me, chances are that the first time you take notice of your sense of smell is when you get home in the evening and start preparing your evening meal, although in my own case I have to admit that even then I sometimes have to be reminded before I take any notice.

The reason why we do not engage our sense of smell is that our modern day environment leaves us with very little to enjoy nose wise. Most of us are challenged since our early morning drive to work by smelly exhaust fumes and general suburban smog.
Scientific discoveries however indicate that our sense of smell is probably one of the senses that have the strongest links to memory, and that smell, together with hearing, touch and taste are important components of our ability to recall events or information.

According to an article in ScienceDaily, Dr Jay Gottfried explained that: "...rather than clumping together the sights, sounds and smells of a memory into one bit of the brain, the memory is distributed across different areas and can be re-awakened through just one of our sensory channels. This mechanism would allow human beings more flexibility in retrieving their memories."

By waking up our senses we are in fact gearing our memory and increasing our brain activity. Fortunately our daily morning routines provide ample opportunity to wake up in the true sense, and a simple way is to choose any of the activities we automatically go through every morning before starting our day. A practice like shaving gives a man a lot of opportunity for indulgent sensory delight, from the smell of the shaving cream to the bite of his after shave, and women have an even wider choice of wake-up routines to choose from.

Just a 10 minute indulgence of our senses can make a world of difference in how we start our day. Once we start our day with our senses in high gear we will find that our minds generally follow the trend set by our senses and we start to see the world much clearer. As if by magic we notice more color and feel more alive. By waking up our senses we open a whole new world of discovery, and all it takes is notice.

In a sense this kind of awakening is a lot like life itself where everything tends to go by pretty much without any excitement until we actually start to notice. When we do we suddenly find answers to questions that have haunted us for months, and solutions to problems we thought were impossible to solve. With the latest scientific research supporting the value of our senses we can no longer ignore that fact that our senses are more than just vestiges of our evolutionary past, they actually make sense!

The nose knows...

Most people can recall someone in their lives who had a nose for trouble, be they the motherly figure that knew when mischief was brewing, or the fiend that always knew when trouble was afoot. The nose is also linked to various other expressions, all with the implication of some "higher" purpose or greater knowledge. Take for instance the expression: "Being led by the nose", or describing someone as noseying around. It now seems that many of these expressions are being supported by scientific discoveries, proving that there is a very good reason that the nose knows.

In a range of experiments towards understanding the human brain and how it works, scientists have found that our noses play an important role in a wide range of human experiences. Findings that our sense of smell and emotions activate the same areas in our brain begs the question whether there is any link between our emotional well being and where we have been poking our noses?

In addition, our sense of smell seems to be active even when we do not notice any, and it has been proven that what we smell may influence what we visually perceive when the odor is linked to memories with negative emotional content. What we smell may therefore filter or color what we see, and in the case where someone was being led by the nose it may just be that the person they following was pleasant on the nose.

Unfortunately no-one can blame their nose for anything because it also seems that we have a semi-conscious ability to increase our perception of smell which causes the neurons in our olfactory bulb, the area in our brain responsible for our sense of smell, to light up in anticipation even if there is no odor. It also gives us the ability to adapt to unpleasant odors, allowing us to ignore them when they permeate the air we breathe from day to day.

All of which still does not fully explain the fact that my mother could smell out secrets, but there seems to be enough reason to pay attention to the person who is smelling the rat. As far as the expressions go I believe they may all have some origin in fact, even if those facts are only now being discovered by science.