Chapter 6 blog---Tom Nichols

This chapter was really long, and it took alot of will power to stay focused and pay attention. At times i found it pretty interesting, but at other times, it was insanely boring.

One thing that captivated me was how our sense of touch is actually several senses in one, those being pressure, warmth, cold, and pain. These combine in various combinations to form a feeling, such as hot, cold, or pain. Also, kinesthesis, the system for sensing the position and movement of individual body part, was fasinating to find that sensors in all over your body allow you to control your body, and knowing at what point your arm is at.
Another thing that was interesting was how we hear things. I never before realized that the soundwaves that reflect off of our ear drums to form sound are actually air waves. The air waves are actually bands of compressed and expanded air. When these travel at different frequencies, different speeds basically, they form a sound that form impulses that are brain turns into audible noises. It was just fasinating to learn how this actually comes about.
Yet another fact that intersested me was sensory interaction, the ability of one sense to influence the other. Before i read this, i never made the connection that other senses can influence how another sense works. For instance, everyone has smelled dead fish, its a horrible smell. The funny thing is that when i ate a jelly bean flavored dead fish it "tastes like it smelled." Through our sense of smell, we can partially understand how things taste by their strong odors. Another example is that the air above the blacktop on a hot summer day "rippling," shows us that it must be hot outside.