The Sculpting Senses of Tomorrow

Today was the last day of a lengthy visit to my childhood home, my family, the surroundings in the midst of which I was raised and grew toward adulthood. Around here, everything smells of the ocean, a potato chip left exposed to the open air for twenty minutes becomes soft and chewy, birds are in constant activity, feeding and flitting and there is an accent more in the way the people walk and interact than in their actual speech. As if engaged in a dance with the dramatically changing seasons, with the wind and rains and snow, the storms and sunshine, their gestures roll and bounce, their steps sway both light and intentional, jokes and wisecracks mingle with talk of life and death. In my teaching as well as the rearing of my own child, I pay attention to the sensory intake of the developing human being. These past few weeks I have been reflecting with gratitude and wonder at this gentle yet dynamic sensory environment in which I grew and changed and learned and played. Many children in today's world receive a large percentage of their sense impressions from a screen, either television, computer or phone, with studies showing children watch an average of about thirty hours each week of television- this does not include the many other activities on various devices. There is also the homogenization of housing developments, big box stores, chain stores, highways, music, clothing. Of course there are exceptional situations in which children are exposed to a diverse and, if uniquely, beautiful array of sense impressions- whether natural environments like that into which I was born or eccentric multi-cultural city-scapes like Brooklyn or Oakland. There are ideas and evidence which suggest that sense impressions not only help to form our minds, our psyches, our beliefs, feelings, prejudices- but they actually help to form our physical bodies, our organs, our hairlines, our pathologies. The future sends forth the question, "What will human beings look and feel like five, ten generations into this technological revolution?" It gives the term cyborg a new nuance. Perhaps we will become robotic not only from the devices with which we engage but also from the inside out. Perhaps our liver will begin to function more in a simple code like html and less in the vast and mysterious code of human chemistry and spiraling forces of growth. The future may reveal in the very structure of the human body the sensory input with which individuals and hereditary lines have engaged- cheekbones and chins carved by salty breezes and prairie winds or thin and agile fingers and flitting eyes of the technologically superior. I like to see children with fingers in mud and rain on their faces or squinting into the sun, corners of eyes wrinkled, but to truly be citizens of tomorrow's world, their fingertips must type and eyes adjust to the hue of liquid crystal and LEDs.