Multi-Modal Senses
Explore the heightened perceptions we can have when we combine senses.
individual senses like your Sense of Sight can tell us a lot, but combining the senses gets us more than just added information. Because this is largely unconscious, it deserves its own pattern.
Our minds automatically learn to combine our senses to give us a richer perception of the world, but when what we learn is inaccurate, especially in interpreting other people, it can lead to miscommunication and conflict.
-
Our brains combine information from each of our senses, based on our previous experience. So this is a learned skill. It allows us a richer, more coordinated experience in that we can understand what someone is saying better if we can both hear them talking and see their mouth moving.
-
These combinations of senses can create synergistic effects. For example, when the information from both eyes are combined, we get parallax which ads depth perception and error correction to our sense of vision. Information from both ears creates a stereo effect and a kind of echo location.
-
Combining senses can also produce illusions. For example, the McGurk-MacDonald illusion occurs when we hear one set of syllables while watching a video of someone mouthing a different set of syllables. Our brains will combine them in a way that we think we hear different syllables altogether.
-
There is some evidence that we can hone these combined senses in way that makes our ability to sense something more effective. For example, with practice, we can get better at combining our sense of a person’s body language, micro-expressions, tone of voice, word choice, and even smell to better understand what they’re feeling and trying to communicate. In the same way, we can learn to combine these signals inaccurately which can be the source of confusion or miscommunication. As a learned skill, even a subconscious one, we have some ability to improve it.
-
This is different than synesthesia, though they’re sometimes confused with each other. Synesthesia is a phenomenon where some people experience a strong association between two senses. For example, some report seeing a specific color when they hear a musical note or sound. There is also a variation where colors are associated with letters or numbers or days of the week, and another where something like time is experienced as distance, where the year 1980 is perceived as “farther away” than 2000.
-
Here are videos showing what one synesthete experiences: https://www.hovalabs.com/synesthesia-light-show
Therefore:
Explore the heightened perceptions we can have when we combine senses, and be aware of them so you can combine them more accurately.
It may be that some senses like our Sense of Livingness are multi-modal senses, but the jury is still out on that