A bit more than a year ago, when I was lost in the work of finishing this dissertation, I participated in a blacksmithing workshop in a big warehouse in the far outskirts of Amsterdam. There, in the dancing lights of the forge, I found something that I did not expect. And that, unsurprisingly in hindsight, made me a better scientist. I entered the forge with the aim of pursuing knowledge, my scientific brain ready to pay attention to every detail of the procedure described by the blacksmiths, to accumulate information, to learn all the tricks. Yet when I started beating the hammer, and for the following hour, very little happened. When I asked the blacksmith how much strength he was using to make the iron melt so easily under his hammer, he looked at me with a smile. “Strength is not the secret, miss”, he said. “You have to hammer with intention. Not the iron, but through the iron. It will not bend otherwise, no matter how hard you try. Stop thinking about it, and try to sense what you’re doing”. So I did, and the iron, still not without effort, finally started bending at my will. The next five hours flew by on the wings of that wholesome sensorial experience: touching the iron, staring in the fire of the forge while waiting for it to melt, feeling the humidity and warmth of the steam when cooling it down, the soreness of lifting that hammer again and again. That day, in the dancing lights of the forge and in the sharp eyes of the blacksmith, I found a truth that I had nearly forgotten during these years venturing through the academic world, which I had long wished to be part of: knowledge and wisdom can be reached not only by attending, studying and remembering facts, but also by opening oneself to sensations. Perhaps not a startling revelation, but rather a reconnection with a familiar state that is easy to bury under the weight of thousands of scientific papers; the state of sensing, a blend of wonder and intuition, like the openness of childhood when the world is learned through exploration rather than explanation.
It is no wonder, then, that many of history’s brilliant minds placed sensations at the center of their pursuit of knowledge. From Aristotle, insisting that all understanding
begins with the senses, to the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, who remarked
that awe before the experience of nature is inseparable from the rigor of scientific
observation. The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated the interplay of
perception and insight, urging us to trust the senses as gateways to intuitions that
cannot be grasped by reason alone. Rachel Carson, too, reminded us that “if facts
are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow,” warning against a science that forgets its grounding in sensations. The words of these thinkers, across centuries, remind me that what I had glimpsed in the forge was not incidental, but perhaps part of a larger truth: that scientific reasoning is sharpened, not dulled, when it is guided by sensation and presence.
If sensations play such a vital role in the process of knowledge, then their place in science should be spoken of openly, which is my intention with this post. What sparked my passion in this field was a genuine interest in people: simply watching them communicate, laugh, argue, or sit quietly on a bench. Which then, inspired
by my biologist colleagues, became an interest in creatures. Every piece of this
dissertation was inspired, first and foremost, by sensing the world around me.
Even if we choose not to formally ground our scientific reasoning in sensation, we cannot exclude it from the products of our work, especially in the social sciences, where we are often the prime actors in the very questions we ought to answer. The interpretations of the data we acquire are never neutral; they are filtered through our own perception, our own attention to detail, our own curiosity. I, quite unexpectedly, grew to find beauty in the way data speak about life or, in psychology, the way they speak about the way we speak. Yet data cannot tell the whole story, and I believe it is all too easy to fall into the trap of assuming that they can. The lived experiences of my participants, the immersion in different cultures, the moments of observation and reflection, all of this was as essential to this dissertation as the numbers, measurements, and coded behaviors you will find in its pages. I see factual knowledge and sensations as a continuous loop, each feeding into the other: sensing the world ignites the spark to seek knowledge, and knowledge, in turn, equips us to sense and appreciate the world with greater depth. Since I so easily forgot it when swallowed by numbers and codes, I want to carve out some space for this personal truth here, mostly for myself, as a mental note to carry with me in both science and life, and perhaps it will give another reader a small thought worth holding onto.
Fabiola Diana 