Gallery of the Senses

Anima Mundi: 

The world soul (Greek: ψυχή κόσμου, Latin: Anima mundi) is, according to several systems of thought, an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, which relates to our world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the human body. The idea originated with Plato and was an important component of most Neoplatonic systems.  -from Wikipedia

Amygdala:

The brain's locus of emotion.  Without an amygdala we cannot experience or process emotional experiences, we cannot express our own emotions, and we cannot learn and remember emotional events.  -from Rachel Hertz in The Scent of Desire

Anosmia:

Smell blindness.

Dysosmia:

When things smell differently than they should.

The Enabling Environment:

The unbreakable connection between the condition of the environment in an area and the well-being of the people who live there.  -from Susan Toch, Environmental Planner

Failure to Thrive:

According to Dr. Ben Benjamin, nearly all infants institutionalized in the United States in the early 1900s died from what is now called failure to thrive. The cause of their death was not unsanitary conditions or lack of nutrition, Benjamin explains, but the absence of human contact.

Five Basic Taste Sensations:

Salt, sour, sweet, bitter, and umami.

Hierophany:

From the Greek roots "ἱερός" (hieros), meaning "sacred" or "holy," and "φαίνειν" (phainein) meaning "to reveal" or "to bring to light") signifies a manifestation of the sacred.  -from Wikipedia

Intimus: 

Your inmost nature; inmost; profound; confidant.

Maenads: 

A Maenad was a "mad woman" who was a follower of Dionysus and who had no temples.  They went to the wilderness to worship, to the wildest mountains, the deepest forests, as if they kept to the customs of an ancient time before men had thought of building houses for their gods.  They went out of the dusty, crowded city, back to the clean purity of the untrodden hills and woodlands.  There Dionysus gave them food and drink: herbs and berries and the milk of the wild goat.  Their beds were on the soft meadow grass; under the thick-leaved trees; where the pine needles fall year after year.  They woke to a sense of peace and heavenly freshness; they bathed in a clear brook.  There was much that was lovely, good, and freeing in this worship under the open sky and the ecstacy of joy it brought in the wild beauty of the world.  -from Edith Hamilton in Mythology

Nociception:

The perception of pain.  -from Wikipedia

Numinous: 

Evoking awe or reverence, as the presence of something holy or divine.  The numinous is the part of spiritual and sacred experience that is characterized by feelings of fascination or awe.  -from The Reader's Digest Great Encyclopedic Dictionary

Odor-Adaptation:

The fact that after about fifteen minutes of smelling a particular aroma you effectively no longer perceive the scent.  -from Rachel Hertz in The Scent of Desire

Odor-Emotional Conditioning:

Odors can literally be transformed into emotions through association and then act as proxies for emotions themselves, influencing how we feel, how we think and how we act.  -from Rachel Hertz in The Scent of Desire

Olfactory-Emotion Translation:

Proposes that the sense of smell and emotional experience are fundamentally interconnected, bidirectionally communicative and functionally the same.  -from Rachel Hertz in The Scent of Desire

Perception: 

The integration of sensations into a coherent model of the changes in energy that surround us.  An atom of perception is the remapping of a single event in the physical world from a single type of sensor.  -from Seth S. Horowitz, PhD in The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind

Phantosmia:

The phenomenon of smelling odors that aren't really present.  -from Wikipedia

Pheromone:

The word pheromone was coined in 1959 by Peter Karlson, a German biochemist, and Martin Luscher, a Swiss etymologist.  It is derived from the Greek pherein, meaning "to carry," and hormon, meaning "to excite"-- in other words, "carrier of excitement."  Pheromones are chemical communication, released by one animal which could affect the physiology or behavior of other animals within its species.  -from Rachel Hertz in The Scent of Desire

Psychophysics:

Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they affect. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual processes by studying the effect on a subject's experience or behaviour of systematically varying the properties of a stimulus along one or more physical dimensions."  -from Wikipedia

Sacred: 

Set apart or dedicated to religious use; hallowed.  Consecrated or dedicated to a person or purpose; entitled to reverence or respect; not to be profaned; inviolable.

Sensuist: 

A sensuist is someone who delights in sensory experience.  It is not the same as a sensualist, one who is gratified by satisfying his or her sexual appetites.

Sensation: 

The initial energy of any stimulus, such as sight, smell, or sound that causes some change in the receiver, which is then transduced into the different form as sensation.

Simultaneous Perception: 

A mechanism that is part of our structure of attention and that drinks in whatever it can from our surroundings.  This underlying awareness seems to operate continuously, at least during waking hours.  It is like a sixth sense, broadening and diffusing the beam of attention evenhandedly across all the senses so we can take in whatever is around us-- which means sensations of touch, and balance, for instance, in addition to all sights, sounds, and smells.  -from Tony Hiss in The Experience of Place

Trigeminal Stimulation: 

Refers to the fact that almost all odors have a feel to them as wells as a smell.  For example, menthol feels cool and amonia feels burning.  What produces these feelings are the temperature, touch, and pain fibers of the trigeminal system in our face and nose.  Odors vary in the degree to which they stimulate the trigeminal system.  -from Rachel Hertz in The Scent of Desire

Umami:

A basic taste sensation first discovered by Japanese researchers and roughly translates from Japanese to English as "deliciousness" or "savory."  -from Rachel Hertz in The Scent of Desire

Umwelt: 

When all of an individual's precepts are added up, the umwelt is formed-- the world we build from our senses.  -from Seth S. Horowitz in The Universal Sense