Sensory Ethnography

 WAKING

Waking up is the most unnoticed sensory experience there is. There is no conscious decision made in order to wake up. The brain sends hormones to all points of the body and this stimulates brain activity to reactivate into a 'waking state'. But the muscles in your body are the ones most affected by this event.

When you first move your muscles as you wake up the tension in them from being motionless for such a long period of time is higher then when they have been used during the day. For this reason, when you first stretch out your limbs and your back a huge flood of oxygenated blood flows to the muscles. This is used to shock the muscles into motion. However, it is often unnoticed as when we wake up we are often so disorientated by our brain activity that we cannot feel our bodies. 

Stretching is the act of supplying more blood to the muscles being stretched, shocking them into movement, it is a way of spurring energy into us as we wake up. 

An interesting point to mention is that our heart rate is higher as we wake up then our resting rate as we are awake. Our brain sends signals to our lungs to breath faster and deeper and our body temperature drops. These are all ways of shocking our muscles into activity. 

For this sensory experience I will be looking more in-depth documentation into the experience of stretching our muscles as we wake up. The feeling of disorientation can often cloud our experience of waking unless we can focus on it.

VERTIGO

Vertigo is the sensation of dizziness, nausea and unbalance. It can affect people very differently. Vertigo is actually affecting us all the time, the small canals of the inner ear hold fluid that controls our equilibrium when moving our heads. It can gauge the speed of movement, rotation and acceleration to balance our bodies. 

The feeling of vertigo is the sense that other objects are moving around you and also the sense that you are moving when other objects should be. Vision is blurred, fuzzy and/or hard to focus on small objects. Details can be hard to notice on objects. Your hands will sweat and shake and your knees will feel weak. Heart rate elevates and the feeling of your stomach turning is quite recognizable, similar to the feeling of being on a roller coaster. 

TEXTING AND WALKING - PERIPHERAL VISION

Peripheral vision is probably the most useful sense that us humans have. It is the ability to focus on small details whilst still being able to notice events that happen around your field of vision. It is most useful in dangerous situations where our eyes are looking for small details whilst having to be aware of the larger events happening elsewhere. 

So when anyone walks down a street they are using their peripheral vision to navigate obstacles that may be coming past. It is also important to mention that peripheral vision is a result of a balanced equilibrium which controls motion awareness and kinematic awareness. 

Peripheral vision is more desaturated and blurred then focused objects making them harder to notice. Peripheral vision can see large flashes of objects and colour. The association process come from the way the brain interprets the image. So some sense of the image can be made. For instance, peripheral vision cannot see the details of a persons face as they walk past you but you still understand that a person just walked past because the shape and colour of the object can be associated to a entire catalogue of images that look familiar. This can explain the phenomena of skewed perception of objects. This is when a person uses the phrase "from the corner of my eye" this is because there is no memory of the image because it was never in focus and thus never recognized.