mischa

Hello, I can see that this post is five years old, so here's hoping you are still out there. I also gather that you were composing some science fiction - guess it has probably been on the shelves for some time now, but I am quite interested in one of the proposed extra senses you wanted to endow your characters with. Specifically, the one that interests me is the ability to sense emotions without seeing someone's body language. This may be more "science truth" than science fiction. Some years ago there was a New Scientist article explaining that our traditional view of having only 5 senses was bunkum; the article cited 21 senses (i.e. 16 new ones) that have recently been discovered by scientists. If I can find the link to that article, I will forward to you. The 16 new senses listed did not include anything related to emotions, but did include one or more related to motion sensing. I have been thinking about the way we sense emotions for some time, primarily because the traditional view (body language and / or hearing someone's tone of voice) just doesn't add up. I am sensitive to other people's emotions to the point that if strong enough, I start feeling what they feel. One could say that my mind is just trying really hard to be empathic with other individuals, but I don't buy that - after all if someone else is feeling angry, I would hardly want to feel angry myself, just to empahise with them - nor would there be any value in this. There are quite a number of people out there who respond to other people's emotions in this way; they often self-identify as highly sensitive people (HSPs), which refers to a neurological trait, whereby people are born with neurons that "amplify" all signals from their environment somewhat more than the neurons of your average joe. Another thing that contradicts our traditional view of emotions is the way that those on the autistic spectrum are said to have "great difficulty reading body language" so that so called non-verbal cues are difficult or impossible for them to obtain. Again this doesn't correlate with the modern picture of autism; which also centers around hyper-sensitive neurology. If one has hyper sensitive neurons, one should be better than average at observing the fine details in any image and picking out the patterns in it. Surely this would go for body language as well. In 2007, Henry Makram and co. wrote a fascinating scientific paper that posited an entirely new theory of what autism is. They cited a great deal of multi-disciplinary literature to support their theory. The part that is especially relevant to this discussion is their take on the autism/non-verbal cues conundrum: they have suggested people on the autistic spectrum may in fact be much more sensitive to the emotions of others than average - to the point that encountering emotions of any strength in others may send them into sensory overwhelm - at which point they would have to withdraw to recover. Constant withdrawal during interactions with others from early life, would result in a deficit of acquired knowledge about the meaning of emotional signals, plus a natural (protective) aversion to processing such "loud" signals. So, here is the crux of the issue - what if we have another way of sensing the emotions of others, that does not involve sight, hearing, touch, taste or smell? Amongst the scientific community, there has been a surprisingly small amount of discussion about this. I suspect the reason for this is that many scientists favour maintaining the identity of humans as separate from other animals, whereas the ability to sense other people's emotions as I have described above, is too reminiscent of what may happen in other vertebrates, or worse still (from their perspective) in insects. There are two possible ways in which this "emotion recieving and emotion transmiting" sense could work, according to the small group of people that have ventured into these discussions. Option 1: Chemosensory reception. In this model, we emit emotions into the air as chemicals, and have chemical receptors to receive the chemical signals created by others. This is in fact precisely what happens in insects - and we share far more with insects than it might at first appear. It is the theory that I favour. Those against this theory assume that the sensory organ receiving such chemicals would have to be the vomeronasal organ - and that there is little evidence for the existance of a functional vomeronasal organ in any humans. I think it more likely that chemical reception is more likely to occur via chemo-receptors all over the skin surface (as with the receptors for touch, for instance). Option 2: Electromagnetic waves. In this model, we emit emotions via electromagnetic waves. and have the corresponding capacity to receive signals created in this way as well. While I would not discount this possibility, it is less well developed and there are far fewer parallel examples of this in other organisms. Also, the proponents of this theory thus far tend not to be scientists and also to be fans of ESP - there has been no attempt to look at this in the scientific literature proper. There you have it - we may all be able to sense other people's emotions without involving our traditional 5 senses. I think a blind and deaf person should be able to sense someone's presence in the room (without the aid of any vibrations) - if I am right (that is if one is not feeling any particular emotion - one would probably just emit something described as "presence". Throughout history, we have learnt much about the human body and how it works when the system or organ of interest is absent. I wonder if it will be this way too with this hypothetical sense that detects emotion. Theoretically, some people might be born unable to transmit emotional signals, or transmit them at such a low frequency that they are not picked up by others. Once again I admit personal experience has had a hand in shaping this idea: other people often seem to have trouble knowing that I'm there - giving me space to take my turn in conversations, or physical space etc. There are others that don't seem to have any trouble either detecting or remembering my presence - and I have observed that these people tend to be more sensitive to environmental signals in general. I am curious to know what you and others think about this. Also if you finished your book, did you give your characters this sense in the end, and what did you come up with as an explanation for the way it worked? Mischa