︎︎︎ Sensation of Space
︎︎︎ Hands, Lists, Archive
︎︎︎ Theory & experimentation
Hands are are a complicated organism, a delta in which life from the most distant sources flows together surging into the great current of action. We build abstract concepts on top of the physical ones. the physical qualities of objects people touched their hardness or softness, heaviness or lightness, roughness or smoothness tilted people’s judgments toward those same abstract qualities. That connection between physical sensation and abstract concept remains, so experiencing the former triggers the latter. Like a magic trick, the phenomenon works only if you’re not aware of what’s really happening. If you pay attention to the fact that you’re touching something hard or heavy, your mind will overrule it. All the senses, including vision, can be regarded as extensions of the sense of touch. They define the interface between the skin and the environment - between the opaque interiority of the body and the exteriority of the world. Vision needs the help of touch, which provides the sensations of solidity, resistance, and protrusion; sight detached from touch could not have any idea of distance, outness, or profundity, nor consequently of space or body. The only sense which can give a sensation of spatial depth is touch, because touch senses the weight, resistance, and three-dimensional shape (gestalt) of material bodies, and thus makes us aware that things extend away from us in all directions.
︎︎︎ Hands, Lists, Archive
︎︎︎ Theory & experimentation
Hands are are a complicated organism, a delta in which life from the most distant sources flows together surging into the great current of action. We build abstract concepts on top of the physical ones. the physical qualities of objects people touched their hardness or softness, heaviness or lightness, roughness or smoothness tilted people’s judgments toward those same abstract qualities. That connection between physical sensation and abstract concept remains, so experiencing the former triggers the latter. Like a magic trick, the phenomenon works only if you’re not aware of what’s really happening. If you pay attention to the fact that you’re touching something hard or heavy, your mind will overrule it. All the senses, including vision, can be regarded as extensions of the sense of touch. They define the interface between the skin and the environment - between the opaque interiority of the body and the exteriority of the world. Vision needs the help of touch, which provides the sensations of solidity, resistance, and protrusion; sight detached from touch could not have any idea of distance, outness, or profundity, nor consequently of space or body. The only sense which can give a sensation of spatial depth is touch, because touch senses the weight, resistance, and three-dimensional shape (gestalt) of material bodies, and thus makes us aware that things extend away from us in all directions.