This thesis provides a history of the sense of touch in modern Britain. Seeking out fugitive intimacies and incidental brushes of lover and stranger alike, it argues that far from being a natural constant, what, how, and why people touched, and what they felt when they did, has a history. Through five case studies of different domains - the mind sciences, visual impairment, public transport, law, and commercialized leisure - it explores how these uses changed, and how they transformed Britons' understandings and experiences of their bodies. Both as a practice and a metaphor, from making space on the bus to keeping 'in touch', touch established the distinctions that Britons made between their bodies and the world and themselves and others. In doing so, touch crucially shaped histories of law, labour relations, scientific experiment, education, and love in the early twentieth century. But it also reformulated the very distinctions of selfhood - distinctions of inner self and outer body, person and thing - on which our accounts of modernity are based. By tracing a history of touch, then, this thesis turns touch into a means of critique. It challenges histories of modernity for which selfhood is a substance rather than produced only through particular social relationships. But it also proposes a new way of thinking about selfhood as an immanent relationship the self has with itself through use of the body. Through historically specific ways of touching, early twentieth-century Britons shaped not only their experience of themselves as bodies, but also the boundaries defining them as selves. Their selfhood was, in short, what they did with the body through touch. By exploring the history of touch between 1870 and 1960, this thesis therefore offers an alternative account of British modernity and a way of re-examining histories of selfhood within and beyond modern Britain.

Karate is a sensuous martial art-come-sporting practice. Through a combinations of tacit exchanges of kicks and punches, sweaty touches, sweaty smells, aggressive shouts, communal laughs and helping tweaks of the body karate practitioners come to develop their practice, know their body and one-another, and assert their status in the karate hall. As a combative bodily practice, karate replicates an imagined, and often real, source of men’s power over, and distinction from, women. Yet in practice karate is an arena where women and men spar, sweat, and laugh together whereby, through inter-bodily, sensory, interactions, women can, and often do, out perform men. As such, karate presents a fruitful arena for exploring the sensory formation of gendered relations and embodiments of gender. Despite the integral role of the body and the senses to embodied participation in sport, and indeed in our gendered performances of self and distributions/assertions of power between women and men, exploration of the role of the senses in our sporting and gendered embodiment is largely absent from existing literature. This thesis argues that to understand gendered embodiment within karate requires reflection to these multidimensional, multi-sensory threads spun between sportsmen and women in embodied play. Building a sensory ethnographic framework for conducting the research, data was gathered from 9 months of ‘sensuous participation’ at 3 karate clubs engaging in mixed-sex and a women-only classes, 6 photo-elicitation interviews and 11 semi-structured interviews with women and men from across the three clubs, and reflections from my own embodied history as a karate athlete. The findings suggest that in both mixed-sex and women-only classes karate practice could ‘undo’ conventional performances of gender, and in turn gendered embodiments, through asking its participants to engage in a range of sensory bodily motions that are conventionally seen as masculine – such as combative movements and aggression – and feminine – such as control, elegance, and artistic performance. These embodied ways of being held magnified gender subversive potential in mixed-sex karate practice whereby ideas of men’s inherent superiority in sport could be challenged, and ideas of distinction between women and men could be challenged. Recognition of similarity as karate practitioners through shared physical engagements side-lined the importance of gender to practitioners embodiment. Together the findings of this thesis point towards the role of the minute, mundane, and thus often overlooked or unconscious elements of our bodily practice in ‘naturalising’, reproducing, or subverting gendered arrangements of power. In this way, this thesis contributes to sociological understandings of both embodiment and gender.

M.A. (Psychology) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

Olfactory perception is as sociocultural a phenomenon as it is a physiological one. Scents of all types and the meanings assigned to them contribute to and shape human cultures, and humans have deliberately manipulated smells to sway the opinions and value judgements of others since, at the very least, the dawn of agriculture. ‘Smellscapes’ define our environments. How we smell what we smell and why we interpret what we smell the way we do are inextricably intertwined, and this was no less true in the Classical world. When we study how people in antiquity examined the sense of smell in general and the corresponding roles of perfume in particular, we see many of the same issues and questions being raised as concern scientists today. Applying modern models to ancient practices can enhance insight into Greek and Roman cultures. This paper will discuss physiological olfactory perception as the authors in the Classical and Hellenistic periods defined and described that, and will examine the primary literature regarding perfume in order to provide a specific example of one way in which we can be initiated into the mysteries of a different and long-gone cultural sensorium through the written word.

Physical and intellectual differences in the home environment of Xhosa and White children suggested that the interaction of touch and vision in situations of sensory conflict and the development of dominance may be different in children from these homes. Children aged 5-13 years were tested on apparatus which created a conflict of tactual and visual judgement about the perceived size of the stimulus. Xhosa and White subjects performed similarly except when only tactual judgement was allowed and the Xhosa group were less influenced by touch. The study concludes that for children touch and vision contribute equally to the resolution of sensory conflict when both senses are active in size-judgements and when only one mode is allowed for judging then the resolution is biased towards this mode. This outcome is different from that of experiments with adults and has implications for theories derived from them.

The present thesis constitutes an empirical investigation of the prediction of Norwich's Entropy Theory of Perception that the positive exponent of the magnitude estimation power function and the negative exponents of equations relating the Weber fraction and simple reaction time to stimulus intensity should, since they can all be derived from the theory's Fundamental Equation, be numerically the same. A pilot study consisting of magnitude estimation and reaction time experiments (using pure tone auditory stimuli of varying intensities at five frequencies), and a "main" study comprised of magnitude estimation, reaction time, and Weber fraction experiments are described. The results, while offering possible confirmation of the prediction, remain somewhat tentative, owing to the persistently problematic technique of curve fitting upon which determination of the reaction time and Weber fraction exponents rests. The theory, in leading one to even attempt to compare such previously unrelated measures as magnitude estimation and reaction time with Weber fractions, has yielded, theoretical issues aside, some worthwhile empirical results: I have obtained measures on three different psychophysical tasks from the same subjects over (effectively) the same stimulus range for each of those subjects; and, moreover have, I believe for the first time, explicitly noted that the Weber fraction displays the same decrease in exponent with increasing frequency, followed by an upturn at the highest frequencies, that characterizes both the equal loudness curves and the reaction time curves a la Chocholle. Suggestions are made regarding supplementary curve fitting methods by which to analyze these data, as well as for future research in the psychophysiological realm which, in addition to expanding the scope of the prediction that is being tested, may provide some much needed insight into the numerical values of the multiplicative and additive constants that occur in the equations under consideration in this thesis. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

“We shape our buildings: thereafter they shape us.” (Churchill 1940, cited in McLuhan 1995, p.62) In the same manner; we have shaped our cities, and accordingly they have shaped our lifestyles into bustling hubs of activity. Networks of roads and trails direct movement with dense high rise structures defining space. The Interior Architect enters this complex scene to become part of a duet rather than a solo, working within existing structural skins and initiating harmony between the desired new and the existing. The aim is to restore a “sense of place” within the existing city fabric through processes of restoration, renovation, preservation and adaptive re-use, extending a building’s lifetime, while preserving its history and character. The objective of this thesis is to propose a way of improving the experience of the public domain within the inner city of Pretoria. A series of communal spaces is proposed that will provide essential public amenities within the city. These interventions guide experience via the senses. The partially abandoned Transvaal Provincial Administration (TPA) building is selected as study area. The intervention is proposed to enable the building to realise a new era in its lifetime by acknowledging it and celebrating it as a modern icon within Pretoria’s Central Business District (CBD) while, at the same time, helping it to shed itself of its negative political association. This is proposed through the adaptive re-use of the structure to accommodate various functions including a conference facility and a new home for Pretoria’s Art Association. / Dissertation (MInt(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Architecture / unrestricted

The environment evolved five human senses; through these receptors the majority of us experience life. Or do we? The a vast majority of our daily landscape resides enclosed, shut off from the exterior; separating people from the elements, organizing and distributing the multitude of functions that affect how we live and feel. The mental state of society is poor, the “daily dis-ease” of we wrestle with; stress, emotions, fatigue, exhaustion, disconnection suck the life out of the moments we live to barely even see. These interactions and experiences we encounter in, on, under and around the architectural forms we travel between are often so boring and ordinary we don’t even label them as experience. I challenge architecture can be more. The tangibles (senses) can be invigorated and spaces can be driven and designed by the senses, by the body and by the mind. The creation of unique experiences involves not only the measureable (light, smell, touch, taste & sound etc.) but also immeasurable effects on the body (memory, unity, serenity, etc.) The core of this project aims to cultivate an architecture that provides an array of nurturing and invigorating experiential and exploratory moments harmoniously placed throughout the natural landscape. Through this reintroduction to experience, the individuals attending the retreat will be engulfed in experiencing the moment and living each breath of sensation. For meditation is the existence in contemplation, relaxation and mental hygiene that provides the platform, the vessel for self-exploration and internal growth. Here the architecture becomes the marbles in the landscape, nestled into the site located in Mountain Park in Holyoke, Ma. “Come experience life, and energize your body and mind”

The encoding of olfactory information starts from the interaction between odorant molecules and olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs). In mouse, one mature olfactory sensory neuron (OSN) almost exclusively expresses one out of ~1,000 odorant receptors (ORs). The relationship between odorants and ORs is promiscuous: one odorant can activate multiple ORs and one OR can be activated by many odorants. This combinatorial olfactory coding scheme is fundamental, but not sufficient to fully understand the peripheral encoding of odor mixtures. Almost all naturally-occurring smells consist of many different odorous compounds; for example, the perception of rose is composed of (-)-cis-rose oxide, beta-damascenone, bata-ionone and many other odorants. It is well appreciated in psychology and perfumery that different components in an odor blend can affect each other, producing modulation effects. However, these effects are often considered to be the results of higher center processing, while odor interactions at the peripheral level have not been comprehensively measured. To evaluate peripheral neuronal responses to odor blends, it is necessary to profile the response patterns of a large population of OSNs while the responses of each individual OSN can be resolved. Conventionally, this has been achieved by imaging OSNs acutely dissociated from the olfactory epithelium with a regular epi-fluorescent microscope. In Chapter 2 of this thesis, such method was utilized to characterize the response patterns of three groups of bio-isosteres. This study reveals that OSNs discriminate odors primarily based on their topological properties rather than chemical properties. Chapter 3 investigates the modulation effects of Hedione, a chemical that has been widely used in perfumery for 60 years. Hedione is psychophysically known as an enhancer that brings up the volume of floral and citrus odors, but the underlying mechanism remains largely unknown. Our study showed that Hedione could both enhance and inhibit odor responses in peripheral neurons, with inhibition being the dominant effect. Moreover, dose-dependent analyses have shown that odorant receptors with lower binding affinity are more prone to inhibition, leading to the hypothesis that Hedione may act as a weak antagonist, which highlights the scent of the leading compound through contrast enhancement. However, the cell imaging method in Chapter 2 and 3 was limited by the low throughput (200 cells per field of view) and cell damage during digestion. Utilizing a new advance in microscopy, Swept Confocally Aligned Planar Excitation (SCAPE), I was able to perform 3D volumetric imaging on the intact olfactory epithelium of OMP-CRE+/-GCaMP6f-/- mice with a perfused half-head preparation. This method is capable of recording over 10,000 OSNs simultaneously with high spatial and temporal resolution. The process of establishing the imaging protocol and data analysis pipeline has been detailed in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 characterizes OSN responses to odor blends using the SCAPE microscopy. A large number of responding cells showed inhibited or enhanced responses to odor mixtures compared with responses to each individual component. Eight structurally and perceptually distinct chemicals were tested, all shown to act as antagonists or enhancers to some extent. Compared with a monotonically additive coding scheme, the presence of widespread modulation effects could diversify the output, thereby increasing the capacity of the olfactory system to distinguish complex odor mixtures. Taken together, these results show that olfactory information is subject to widespread modulation in the olfactory epithelium. This unusual complexity at the primary receptor level implies an information coding strategy different from those utilized by visual and acoustic systems, where complex interactions among stimuli only occur at higher levels of processing. Further experiments are needed to explain the mechanisms at the molecular level and to link peripheral neuronal responses to psychophysics and behavior.

Nineteenth-century, Europeans experienced the rise of gastronomy alongside the rise of the modern nation-state. These two concepts were tied together inextricably by the intense consideration of national cuisines. Thus, the topic of food -- the judgment of food -- embedded and extended social commentary of the "other." Sensorial experience contributed to discourse, which expressed not only an awareness of aesthetics (traceable to the palate) but also a reflective characterization of those who ate the food. For England and the United States, the nineteenth-century witnessed moments of unrivaled power while the once-global power, Spain, was economically and politically anemic. Food becomes the axis point of three converging spectra: the senses which inform the individual with external environments and nationalism as discourse that creates understanding of the world; internal and external identities, meaning diet as tied to one's constitution and national cuisines reflecting culture; and the role of the historical memory in creating the political imagination. Through these concepts, the individual body and the body politic would be the material understanding of conceptual ideas. Eating is unique as the only act that employs all of the senses. Boundaries are crossed, and the individual becomes part of the collective. With these reoccurring themes, I argue that the boundaries of the past, of geography, and the body become ways a perceived knowledge and truth about Spain was created. By using a range of sources, which include material culture, cookbooks, and travelogues, and by paying particular attention to how sensorial experiences are portrayed, we can better understand the prominent connection of food and power. Spain's unique position -- of having 700 years of Islamic occupation and a failed empire from the "Spanish decadence" -- allowed the Spanish to consider who they were as a nation and for outsiders to reify the stagnate status of Spain, supported by economic and political evidence. By portraying Spain as romantic and savage, but also impotent, nineteenth-century English and American writers limited its cultural identity as inert and unprogressive; Spain's limited food supply and cuisine – good or bad –reflected a national character of stunted development that was circulated, reinterpreted and translated.