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In-Depth Information
environment), our sense of time, our body tempera-
ture, or physiological responses to our emotions.
Some animals have strong geospatial sense of the
direction; we do not navigate like earthworms,
fish, bees, or birds do. We cannot measure with
our senses the strength of electric and magnetic
fields, and also week electromagnetic fields, in
spite of the warnings that electromagnetic fields
produced by such man-made devices as mobile
phones, computers, power lines, and domestic
wiring might have harmful effects on living organ-
isms: cell membranes, DNA, metabolism, and also
neuronal activity (Goldsworthy, 2007). Also, we do
not estimate without tools the air pressure or our
blood pressure, to name a few. Therefore, we have
to rely on man-made sensors and devices.
in thriller or science fiction films; it has been also
used for interrogations, causing harmful, negative
effects. Bales & Kitzmann (in Yang, 2011) lists
modes of communication (signal modalities) as
visual, acoustic, chemical (pheromones produced
and released by animals), tactile, electrical, and
seismic signals resulting in vibration of earth. For
example, a blind mole rat's thumping on burrow
walls transmits over very long distances. The same
message can be conveyed and received in many
ways: visually with the semaphore flags (signals
made with hand-held flags, rods, disks, paddles,
or just hands), sonically (3 times 3 long versus
short sounds: “· · · — — — · · ·” for the SOS, or
through the international Morse code, for example
as a distress signal.
First of all, describing senses in separate groups
may be seen improper because senses are intercon-
nected in many ways. Communication may be here
seen as an exchange of sensory information in the
form of different kinds of perception through the
senses. Signals coming from the senses are often
combined to convey a clear message. For example,
we can receive information about numbers from
various senses, looking at patterns, listening to
sounds, feeling vibrations, or reading numbers.
MODES OF GATHERING
INFORMATION AND
COMMUNICATION THROUGH
THE SENSES
We may wonder what is the relation between
information and communication: parents receive
information about their infant's discomfort with
their smell sense, and then a baby communicates
by voice (so the parents can communicate also with
the use of hearing). Thus information may be seen
as a fact we are aware of, but not a signal. Also, the
data is a fact that does not communicates anything
if not received and interpreted. Experiments on
sensory deprivation include the deliberate cutting
out all sensory stimuli by putting a person in a
dark, acoustically isolated space with lukewarm
isotonic water with the water density equal to the
density of one's body, where a person doesn't
feel gravity, cannot sink nor go up to the surface.
Sensory deprivation has been used in psychology
to achieve therapeutic desensitization, to allevi-
ate and mitigate phobias and other disorders, in
alternative medicine as a factor conducive to
meditation and altered states of mind, as a tool
for training prospective pilots and astronauts, and
Signals and Spectra
Generally speaking, we receive sensory messages
as electromagnetic waves having the distinctive
wavelengths, energy, and frequency that are clearly
identified by our senses. Some could imagine that
the electromagnetic spectrum (Figures 1 and 2),
as a common link behind most of the sensory
signals, might best characterize our world. The
electromagnetic spectrum includes, from longest
wavelength to shortest: radio waves, microwaves,
infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays, and
gamma rays (Table 1). Only part of the spectrum
can be detected by our senses, for instance as
sounds, heat, or light.
This can be also shown with the use of symbols
(Figure 2).
