Six senses in the literature

prose in particular can modify an unsuspecting reader’s physiological and emotional states profoundly. the semantic priming test in modern psychology exploits this phenomenon—for example, people start to feel and behave as though they have suddenly grown older after they have read a scrambled sequence of words enriched with ageingrelated connotations (Srull & Wyer, 1979). the priming effect is largely independent of our conscious understanding of a text: autistic children, whose text comprehension is mildly impaired, respond to semantic priming the same way as non-autistic children (Saldana & Frith, 2006). Furthermore, our emotional response to a sequence of words depends in part on our genetic background. children of parents with bipolar disorder, for example, have been shown to react much more vividly to words that have undertones of social threat than children in a control group (gotlib et al, 2005). Semantic priming can significantly affect the model of the outside world reported by our senses; merely naming an odour ‘cheddar cheese’ or ‘body odour’ can determine our perception of it as being pleasant or nauseating (de araujo et al, 2005). the selection of words in a composition also reveals the personality traits of the author to the reader. a person’s colour preferences and idiosyncrasies provide information relevant to their psychological evaluation (Lüscher, 1969). For example, Lüscher’s test links blue colour preference to a person’s “depth of feeling”, that is, the person tends to be concentric, passive, incorporative, heteronomous, sensitive, perceptive and unifying. Similarly, the colour yellow indicates spontaneity; yellow-loving people tend to be eccentric, active, projective, autonomous, expansive, aspiring and investigatory. Lüscher also attached special meaning to a person’s choice for combinations of colours. Schizophrenia patients—who are especially susceptible to semantic priming—have a characteristic utterance pattern: the patients’ own words generate diverse secondary associations in their minds. these self-inflicted associations surface in the patients’ utterances and disturb the clarity of their messages (Maher et al, 2005). Of the vast swathes of published literature, scientific texts have a reputation for being factual, rational and ‘dry’ in contrast to other prose that is designed to evoke emotional responses. in this study, we therefore analysed the frequencies of use of sensory words and time-related terms in a large collection of biomedical texts, and compared the results with similar analyses of a collection of news articles, a large encyclopaedia, and a body of literary prose and poetry. We found that, unlike literary compositions and newswire articles, biomedical texts are extremely sensory poor, yet rich in overall vocabulary. it is likely that the sensory-deprived writing style that dominates the biomedical literature impedes text comprehension and numbs the reader’s senses and mind.