Hidden Scents: The Language of Smell in the Age of Approximation

Hidden Scents: The Language of Smell in the Age of Approximation PDF Author: Allen Barkkume
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1365292762
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
Hidden Scents will vaporize you into an aromatic molecule, tickling the brain-fingers in your nose. A cacophony of receptor neurons activating and inhibiting, you become a recognized pattern and burst towards the limbic superhighway of the primitive organism. You are an emotion, a virtual body-state stored in memory, coming to life once again in the act of perception. In a breath, you are exhaled, washed away into the lexicographical maelstrom of the Language of Smell. Hidden Scents explores our consensual reality, and reveals its inherent ambiguity. On the surface, however, it is a book about the olfactive system, not only of the human but of human culture. In the concluding series of essays, olfaction is used as a paradigm for navigating issues on the threshold of public discourse: space and dimensionality, artificial intelligence, quantum theory, and the future of the internet. Be warned - you might never smell the same again.

Hidden Scents: The Language of Smell in the Age of Approximation

Hidden Scents: The Language of Smell in the Age of Approximation PDF Author: Allen Barkkume
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1365292762
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 118

Get Book Here

Book Description
Hidden Scents will vaporize you into an aromatic molecule, tickling the brain-fingers in your nose. A cacophony of receptor neurons activating and inhibiting, you become a recognized pattern and burst towards the limbic superhighway of the primitive organism. You are an emotion, a virtual body-state stored in memory, coming to life once again in the act of perception. In a breath, you are exhaled, washed away into the lexicographical maelstrom of the Language of Smell. Hidden Scents explores our consensual reality, and reveals its inherent ambiguity. On the surface, however, it is a book about the olfactive system, not only of the human but of human culture. In the concluding series of essays, olfaction is used as a paradigm for navigating issues on the threshold of public discourse: space and dimensionality, artificial intelligence, quantum theory, and the future of the internet. Be warned - you might never smell the same again.

Popular Science

Popular Science PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Popular Science gives our readers the information and tools to improve their technology and their world. The core belief that Popular Science and our readers share: The future is going to be better, and science and technology are the driving forces that will help make it better.

The Spell of the Sensuous

The Spell of the Sensuous PDF Author: David Abram
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307830551
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception. For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate." How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.

The Book of Perfumes

The Book of Perfumes PDF Author: Eugene Rimmel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Perfumes
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description


The Hidden Sense

The Hidden Sense PDF Author: Cretien Van Campen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262265001
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
The uncommon sensory perceptions of synesthesia explored through accounts of synesthetes' experiences, the latest scientific research, and suggestions of synesthesia in visual art, music, and literature. What is does it mean to hear music in colors, to taste voices, to see each letter of the alphabet as a different color? These uncommon sensory experiences are examples of synesthesia, when two or more senses cooperate in perception. Once dismissed as imagination or delusion, metaphor or drug-induced hallucination, the experience of synesthesia has now been documented by scans of synesthetes' brains that show "crosstalk" between areas of the brain that do not normally communicate. In The Hidden Sense, Cretien van Campen explores synesthesia from both artistic and scientific perspectives, looking at accounts of individual experiences, examples of synesthesia in visual art, music, and literature, and recent neurological research. Van Campen reports that some studies define synesthesia as a brain impairment, a short circuit between two different areas. But synesthetes cannot imagine perceiving in any other way; many claim that synesthesia helps them in daily life. Van Campen investigates just what the function of synesthesia might be and what it might tell us about our own sensory perceptions. He examines the experiences of individual synesthetes—from Patrick, who sees music as images and finds the most beautiful ones spring from the music of Prince, to the schoolgirl Sylvia, who is surprised to learn that not everyone sees the alphabet in colors as she does. And he finds suggestions of synesthesia in the work of Scriabin, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Nabokov, Poe, and Baudelaire. What is synesthesia? It is not, van Campen concludes, an audiovisual performance, a literary technique, an artistic trend, or a metaphor. It is, perhaps, our hidden sense—a way to think visually; a key to our own sensitivity.

The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain

The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain PDF Author: Terrence W. Deacon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393343022
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
"A work of enormous breadth, likely to pleasantly surprise both general readers and experts."—New York Times Book Review This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions. Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.

Outlook

Outlook PDF Author: Alfred Emanuel Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 906

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Book Description


Sophie's World

Sophie's World PDF Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 735

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Book Description
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Introduction to Perfumery

Introduction to Perfumery PDF Author: Anthony Curtis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 810

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Book Description


Rethinking Symbolism

Rethinking Symbolism PDF Author: Dan Sperber
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521099677
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
"The main thrust of this book is to deliver a major critique of materialist and rationalist explanations of social and cultural forms, but the in the process Sahlins has given us a much stronger statement of the centrality of symbols in human affairs than have many of our 'practicing' symbolic anthropologists. He demonstrates that symbols enter all phases of social life: those which we tend to regard as strictly pragmatic, or based on concerns with material need or advantage, as well as those which we tend to view as purely symbolic, such as ideology, ritual, myth, moral codes, and the like. . . ."—Robert McKinley, Reviews in Anthropology