The Power of The Special Senses by Barry Boxer

THE POWER OF THE SPECIAL SENSES

A SERIES OF MUSINGS ON HEARING AND SEEING, TOUCH, TASTE AND SMELL

COMPOSED BY DAVE HAMBIDGE ONE TIME PSYCHIATRIST CURRENTLY ALL ROUND GOOD EGG

The special senses of the human brain are easily stimulated to produce evocative memories from our past. Here are four such from my own life. Hearing and Vision

page 3

Touch

page 6

Taste

page 10

Smell, with warning to reader

page 14

This coloured brain scan is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PET-image.jpg provided by http://www.jens-langner.de/ and used under the copyright stipulated on wikipaedia

HEARING AND VISION Which music track does it for you, and why? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYeDsa4Tw0c was played on the cruise ship sound system as we steamed around about 1/4 mile off a glacier edge in Kongsforden, part of Svalbard/Spitzbergen. http://www.svalbard-images.com/spitsbergen/

We had been steaming north for 2 days from northern Norway in dense sea fog; couldn't see more than 150 yards at best and the regular boom of the foghorn was eerie. Dawn, when we got up at about 0530 hrs local time (the sun hadn't actually set being well north of the Arctic circle) revealed NyAlesund and the surrounding mountains bathed in brilliant sunshine against a real aqua-blue sky.

We had a smashing time ashore in the tiny community which has the most northerly post box in the world,

seeing snow buntings breeding in the insulation around the hot water pipes that join the buildings.

On leaving, the skipper took us 'up the map' to view; http://www.svalbard-images.com/photos/photo-svalbard-019-e.php where thousands of little auk sea birds were skimming across the dead flat sea to and from the shore. Everyone was up on deck, crew,

galley staff, waiters, engine room folk, the lot. Listening to the music and sharing that magic moment was a real joy; brings the tears to my eyes typing about it and listening to the sound.

AND HERE IS OUR SHIP ARRIVING AT NY-ALESUND ON THE VERY DAY 5

TOUCH The sensation of touch is a complex synthesis of skin perception and joint position receptors; involving fine nerve fibres that can be easily damaged by trauma, fractures and nerve degenerative disorders such as MS. Those who claim to know about such things state that two parts of our body are the most sensitive; lips and genitalia. Which might explain why oral sex is so popular? Accordingly, other regions of the human body are much less specific and accurate in sensation. Ever had a splinter in the hand, you know exactly where it is, to the nearest micrometer. Yet, a similarly sized lesion on the back can feel anywhere between shoulder blade and hip bone. (Despite the pop song from way-back-when, the shoulder bone does not correct directly to the hip bone, whatever the lord says).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_skeleton_front.svg 6

Compounding the peculiarities of exteroception (tee-hee, ten kudos points if you know that word) is the automatic, subconscious filtering of touch signals by the brain. Put simply, you would go totally bonkers from sensory overload if the brain constantly informed you of such routine data as 'your shirt is rubbing your elbow'. Try a little test of your brain's performance in this manner. Go on, humour me, it won't hurt and nobody will know what you are doing unless you tell them. Concentrate on feeling whatever the tip of your right big toe is currently touching. Sock, slipper, shoe, black silk stockings held up by ivory suspender...

(Sorry, got a bit distracted there). It may take some concentrating to 'feel' this, but persist and it will happen. When it does, regard how odd it is, may be irritating or ticklish? Then try and ignore it again. Won't go away? Still there? Panic not; it will fade back to its previous anonymity before too long. Which is all pseudo-scientific background to why my most intense non-sexual tactile sensation involved the sole of my right foot.

As a teenager, just after the dinosaurs had keeled over, I was a sporting nut, especially the great game of rugby football union. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwCbG4I0QyA&feature=related I played for the school team and other clubs from the age of 12 to 19 years old. Often three games a week and lots of training on top of that; yep I was a fit lad. We would start intensive preparations as soon as school reassembled in early September. Which was all fine and dandy' except that one year, about AD1971, we had a very hot and dry summer and the playing fields were rock hard. Being a cheapskate, I was still wearing the previous seasons heavily worn studded boots, in which the lining had putrefied and rotted away. After a couple of hours of wear the washer into which the stud under the ball of my foot was screwed in pushed up into my sole. No problem for a 'toughie teenager', keep going lad! The little blister formed sort of contracted and expanded over the next few days before our first competitive game. We won a hard fought match, as indeed we did every other one in what became the school's most successful season to date. That night at youth club (another passion of the era) my right foot started throbbing and hurt, frankly, 'quite a lot'. Come the Sunday morning and I could not walk on that foot which now felt the size of two rugger balls and burned, also 'quite a lot'. Why not go and see a doctor? Ah, well, at that time I was sort of banned from the local A+E for frequent attendance with sports related minor injuries; they were sick of seeing me! By Monday morning, I had no option but to travel the half mile up the road to the casualty and risk the wrath of the sister-in-charge. Who was surprisingly charming when she saw the sole of my foot. I was catapulted to the head of the queue and was soon lying on one of the treatment couches. Where the duty doctor gave me a blunt bollocking for delaying getting treatment for incipient blood poisoning from the huge and infected skin abscess on my right sole!

Then he sprayed the skin with ether and 'deroofed' the manky blister (cut the head off; about the size of a pound note for those of a certain vintage) and cleaned out the pus and grot. Job done, he went off and left the sister to dress the exposed wound with an iodine coated petroleum jelly impregnated paper mesh called tullegrass. She then wrapped the whole foot in a single layer of bandage and then invited me to get up and walk away. Oh, the sensation from the sole of that foot as I stepped on it! I could feel the minute cracks in the floor tile surface as I gratefully hobbled down the corridor. And the seemingly thick edge of a tiny piece of paper on the way. Walking on the smooth tarmacadam road surface was a revelation to my senses; it was more like a a nutmeg grater. Every slight divot was excruciatingly sensual. Even the thinnish carpet at home felt lush and soft, inches thick in pile. This experience lasted for about 2 days then passed on. I had to miss the next rugger match as my foot had not healed. And yes I invested in some new boots. But, 38 years later, when the skin on the ball of my right foot cracks, as it often does, exposing the newer dermis beneath, a quick rub of the offending split is so erotic and pleasurable. (Nearest I get these days).

TASTE The sensation of taste in humans is almost as imprecise as the ability to discern smells, which forms a separate diatribe on page 14. In essence, our taste buds only react to four different substances; at least it was four when I was taught anatomy and physiology back in the early seventies, they may have discovered a few more since but I can't be AÂŁ$%D to check. All our claimed taste sensitivity comes from a complex balance of these four basics, a bit like light being made up of seven different primary colours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue So, our brains can be quite easily fooled into believing that what we have got in our gobs is not what is exactly there. Thus food science is a big industry, 'persuading us' that our crisps contain spud, when the nearest they have been to this vegetable is a chap on the factory production line.

All this I knew at an academic level and to a degree from personal experience. But, all that changed the day after 'they' split my sternum in half, exposed my ticker, stopped it with cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB), cut out the diseased and deformed aortic valve, inserted a nice fully functional carbon fibre valve and sewed everything back up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apikal4D.gif The above link is to a superb animated 3-D image of heart valve function.

I had known since I was about five that me heart valve was dud and had to have it checked every so often, but otherwise I lived a full life of exercise, sport, song, women (OK not the last 2). In 1996 I went to Leicester for a 3 yearly check-up and took my then fiancée Hazel for the trip; “half an hour in clinic then when can do the shops”. Not quite. Before seeing the consultant I had an ECK (EKG in certain strange parts of the world) and chest X-ray (CXR). I sneeked a peek at the CXR as I knew enough to roughly interpret it; oh sh1tty pooh. My heart was well enlarged from the strain of trying to push the blood through the damaged aortic valve. The consultant was polite but firm, have the operation or be dead in a couple of years. And all this just 6 weeks before our wedding. SO, our wedding took place followed by a smashing honeymoon in Edinburgh my favourite city bar none of those I've ever been to.

Edinburgh Castle photos pillaged from

Edinburgh Old Town

http://www.edinburgh-tattoo.co.uk/edinburgh/index.html

All the preliminary tests were done before the day, 1 November 1996. I recall nothing from about 0815 that day until about 24 hours later when I came to having had various pipes pulled out of my chest, neck, throat, willy, abdomen and arm. Within 3 hours we (and I was just one of 9 cardiac surgery patients operated on that day in what was a specialist hospital) were turfed out of ITU to make way for the next batch and plonked onto a ward. Come lunchtime on that day, with my new valve barely a day old, the staff nurse offered us all a beer with our food. Hang on ma'am, are you sure? Yes, doctor, it helps stimulate the appetite and cheer you miserable buggers up (or words to that effect). So I accepted a small can of Bass Indian Pale Ale. The first slurp was like a scale coursing through my marvellous, cool, refreshing subsequent sip was even

taste explosion of a nuclear mouth. Absolutely and tasty. And each better; nectar of the gods.

In retrospect, I think I became mildly hypomanic after the operation; a combination of emotional relief, all the drugs used in the operative procedure and a well known but little discussed side-effect of CPB. When ones blood is being pushed around all the plastic and Teflon tubes in the machine, tiny little clots of blood cells form.

http://www.hsforum.com/stories/storyReader$1486 12

These can and do enter the patient and get pushed all around the body, especially the brain. There they can stick and wedge in the minute brain blood vessels, causing a full blown stroke if you have offended the deities, or a temporary 'mini-stroke' which gets washed away in the first few days post-op. In my case, the 'little sticky bits' hung out in the part of the brain that controls mood, sending me mildly, temporarily up the wall and off my chuff. My thought were racing and energy overflowed; I walked the hospital corridors at night as I couldn't sleep and talked the hind legs off three donkeys. In such a euphoric state, all sensation is enhanced, so maybe the beer was crap, but 'by gum', it tasted grand every day I was in hospital. So, even 13 Â˝ years later, the taste of pale ale vividly reminds me of a very unique time in my life. By the way, on the drive home from Leicester, the car tyres sounded like bagpipes, all the way for 45 miles. Any theories on that one? ----------------------------------PS How many different types of bagpipes are there? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC6oCewgUBo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4CRwrR_lBE http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=uzF35iRocJA&feature=PlayList&p=2E0F5F79DA4374A5&playnext= 1&playnext_from=PL&index=21 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T140DXFHA&feature=PlayList&p=2E0F5F79DA4374A5&index=25

SMELL The sensation of smell in humans is almost as imprecise as the ability to discern taste, which forms a separate diatribe on page 10. But, the senses of taste and smell conflate in an exponential way to enhance our experience. Which is quite true and lies at the heart of this anecdote.

NOW BE ADVISED, THOSE OF A DELICATE DISPOSITION OR FIXED VIEWS ON PIGS SHOULD READ NO FURTHER IF YOU OPT TO CONTINUE, YOU RISK BEING OFFENDED FOR WHICH I ACCEPT NO RESPONSIBILITY 14

When I was a very baby doctor, indeed doing my first 6 month stint as a house-surgeon, I was required to be on duty in a 1 in 2 rota, some 148 hours over a fortnight. We all did such in those days, and were very lucky to get any sleep during a night on call. Chronic fatigue slumped into nervous exhaustion especially on the working weekend which went from Friday 0900hrs to following Tuesday 1700hrs. Consequentially, to survive, each baby doctor adopted a coping style ranging from over-involvement to total apathy, and all points in between. I tended to the former and gained a huge amount of invaluable experience of both medicine and human nature. But it also meant that I was in the very wrong place at a bad time. Having been a medical student in the A+E department of this midland's hospital, I was always welcomed there at any time, whether I'd been bleeped to go or not, and coffee lovingly prepared by these old friends. (I suspect I fell asleep on their crew-room sofa on many nights!) I was tiptoeing through an unusually quiet A+E in the middle of one night, hoping to sneak up on the nurses and make some obscene noise to frighten them with. I needn't have bothered, they were all (eight staff in total) in the main 'crash bay', gathered around an obviously grieving family and a large body covered up on the trolley in the centre. At this point, my nose became aware of the dreadful, sickening, nauseating and permeating stench of burnt human flesh. My stomach, overdosed on coffee as it was, started to rumble and I was very near to puking over the floor. I managed to withdraw from the room and trotted to the open front door of A+E for urgent fresh air, where I found a knot of ambulance staff and police officers similarly engaged. They recognised a fellow sufferer and told me the tale.

The body belonged to an Asian lady of considerable proportions who had been wandering about at home, as was her divine right and pleasure, in a sari; vivid blue. She walked too closely by a paraffin gas room heater, wafting the garment into the open flame. The synthetic material 'exploded' into a raging flame for about 20 seconds, leaving her with 95% third degree burns. Nobody has ever survived such burns, living after 40% is good going even these days. The emergency ambulance could do nothing more than rush her by police escort to A+E where she was quickly given a large, knowingly fatal, dose of morphine to ease her pain. After commiserating with them, I went back to the cubicle to see how my friends were coping. The family had been taken to a special sideroom for tea and sympathy, whilst the nurses were preparing to clean up the body. They asked me to record any other signs of trauma, 'because you never can be sure... as the coroner says'. When they gently and reverently exposed the recently deceased, all I could see and smell was a well done hog roast at a country fair. (You were warned at the start.) And for the next two decades or longer, if the Sunday roast pork got overcooked, then my mind would spontaneously trip back to that awful night; but never with chicken, beef, lamb or whatever. And I was always very wary of pork crackling, just in case. The flashbacks did settle about a quarter of a century later, which is why I can now share this tale for the first time ever other than with my wife Hazel. I never even told my first wife, you know?

THIS SERIES OF ANNECDOTES CONTAINS FACTUAL INFORMATION ANONYMISED TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT

THE TALES WERE FIRST AIRED DURING MARCH 2009 AT SHORT STORY LIBRARY FORUM ALL AND ANY SHORT FICTION WRITERS ARE WELCOME AT http://forum.shortstory.us.com/index.php

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BUT WITH FULL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF SOURCE

I TRUST THAT YOU ENJOY MEMORIES STIMULATED BY YOUR OWN SPECIAL SENSES DAVE HAMBIDGE APRIL 2009