3. But It Smelled So Good: Burning Your Tongue on Freshly Bakes Cookies
Exploring Bodies, Memories, Media, and the Military
Embodied Cognition
The smell of cookies baking can cause a lot of thoughts to run through your mind. If your housemate loves to bake, you might remember the last batch of cookies they made. If you already had cookies at lunch, you might be trying to justify eating fresh-baked cookies.
Let’s not forget this is your kitchen. Maybe you feel comforted by familiar smell of your housemate’s baking. Maybe you remember a really good batch of cookies, warm with melted chocolate. Or, if you were too eager for sweets, you might remember burning your tongue on a cookie that was too hot. All of these thoughts, memories, smells, and experiences are part of your cognitive process.
Writing this makes me think of the cookies my grandma made, a memory unique to me.
These personal memories and experience are also related to our bodies. We remember smell, taste, texture, sound, and sight. This body-memory is called embodied cognition.
Embodied cognition is at the crossroads of science and philosophy (not unlike Design). It’s a way of thinking about the mind that takes into account your unique language, senses, memory, brain chemistry, abilities, and experience. People who study embodied cognition believe that a person’s body is an instrument to help make sense of the world.
Media Determine Our Situation
How do you see the world? Do you notice when a movie is in High Definition? Does your phone automatically adjust it’s brightness when you go into a dark room? These are examples of the relationship between media and our senses.
Media and senses have been reciprocal for hundreds of years. The first well known example is linear perspective. Most students in the US education system learn to draw in linear perspective around 6th grade.
This day in art class is the result of early Renaissance artists working to translate the 3D world onto a 2D surface. The transformation of art, architecture, visual media, and design was forever altered at this invention. Humans had finally taught themselves to see the world in a mathematically accurate way.
This same transformation of human sense perception can be seen today in the invention of Apple’s responsive Retina Display, featuring “True Tone technology…[that] automatically adjusts to match the color temperature of the light around you — for a more natural viewing experience.”
Media expands our ability to understand human senses. How do you think the new forms of media, like augmented reality, might affect our senses and embodied cognition?
Models, Metaphors, Militaries
“We knew nothing about our senses until media provided models and metaphors.” Friedrich Kittler said that in 1999 as part of his Optical Media lecture series. Kittler was a German media theorist who‘s work explores media, technology, and the military.
One of his most interesting ideas is that “media” is made up of many smaller inventions. These smaller inventions were, however, always created to meet military demands. Media is an assembly of military technology repackaged and adopted domestically.
“Technical innovations — following the model of military escalations — only refer and answer to each other…which is an overwhelming impact on sense and organs in general.”
These military inventions eventually became radio, television, the internet, and virtual reality. Kittler was concerned with how we would come to understand our senses if the media we use was created with military intent.
This concern extends into empathy. Empathy is something we learn by being in the world and examining our own body-memory. How does this relationship between empathy, media, and our senses change if we examine this connection to the military?
This article is part of a series: How Do We Get There From Here? Each essay explores a component of Design and how it shapes our practices. You can find the full series and related content at How Might We…, ongoing thoughts from my Graduate work at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design.
