Museums and the Embodied Mind: Sensory Engagement with Artworks and Architecture

摘要

We commonly suppose that we can use our senses one by one. People looking round a gallery usually think they are using their eyes alone to explore the artworks in front of them, preferring to contemplate them in hushed silence. Similarly, people in concert halls take themselves to be relying on their ears alone to experience the music they are listening to, often closing their eyes to hear better. These are natural ways to understand our experiences, yet our brains do not work that way. Whatever we perceive, our perceptions are shaped by the interaction of different sensory modalities. We do not experience the world in separate parcels: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting. Instead, we are bombarded by multiple sensory inputs that combine to produce a unified conscious field. You see and hear things happening around you simultaneously, you smell the scents in the air and perhaps you have a lingering taste of coffee in your mouth. These are not experienced separately but as parts of a single perceptual scene.