Six senses in the literature

Abstract

“It is beyond our power to fathom,Which way the word we utter resonates,Thus, like a sudden grace that comes upon us,A gift of empathetic understanding emanates.” Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–1873), Russian poet (Translated by Mikhail N. Epstein at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA). When we read prose—whether technical or literary—our mind parses sentences to recover their meaning. Yet, the flow of the words themselves can invoke surprising or unexpected sensory responses, even for the writer. Even a very rational and technical text can typically affect the reader on multiple cognitive levels, in addition to its basic task of transmitting the author‐intended meaning. > Prose in particular can modify an unsuspecting reader's physiological and emotional states profoundly Prose in particular can modify an unsuspecting reader's physiological and emotional states profoundly. The semantic priming test in modern psychology exploits this phenomenon—for example, people start to feel and behave as though they have suddenly grown older after they have read a scrambled sequence of words enriched with ageing‐related connotations (Srull & Wyer, 1979). The priming effect is largely independent of our conscious understanding of a text: autistic children, whose text comprehension is mildly impaired, respond to semantic priming the same way as non‐autistic children (Saldana & Frith, 2006). Furthermore, our emotional response to a sequence of words depends in part on our genetic background. Children of parents with bipolar disorder, for example, have been shown to react much more vividly to words that have undertones of social threat than children in a control group (Gotlib et al , 2005). Semantic priming can significantly affect the model of the outside world reported by our senses; merely naming an odour ‘cheddar cheese” or ‘body odour” can determine our perception of it as being pleasant or nauseating (de Araujo et al , 2005). The selection of words in a …