Free Dancing Naked in the Mind Field by Kary Mullis

forth 50 or 60 times a second, it causes our eardrum to sway gently back and forth, and we hear a very deep hum, like the sound of AC power out of the wall outlet in America, getting into your audio system. If the air pulses in and out around 880 times per second, the eardrum vibrates and we hear a sound like the middle A on a piano. At 2 times 880 equal to 1760 cycles per second, we hear an A one octave higher. At 3520 cps, we hear the next A up the keyboard, and so forth. At 20,000 we no longer hear sound, even though the air around our ears is still vibrating. Some component in our detection system fails. Although air can vibrate at even much higher frequencies, we can’t hear it. Dogs can hear higherpitches than we can, children higher than adults, and women higher than men in general. Our window on sound is narrow. It is pretty much centered on the range of sounds that our bodies can make. Our ears must have evolved mostly for the purpose of listening to ourselves.
    Our biggest window is vision. In this case we are tuning in to the vibrations not of air but of something we call electromagnetic fields. If you could wiggle a little magnet 428 trillion times per second, it would start making red light—not because it was getting hot but because the magnetic field was oscillating back and forth. The magnet could be cold. I don’t know anybody who could actually wiggle a magnet that fast—this is what is called a thought experiment. The point is that the magnet is not getting hot from the friction of the movement in air; it could be happening in a vacuum. It is the back and forth motion of the magnetic field around the magnet that is making the light. A little faster, 550 trillion times per second, it would glow green. At around 800 trillion times per second, even in a dark room, the light from the wiggling magnet would no longer be visible to you. A little faster, and it might start causing sunburn on your face, but you could no longer see it. It would be what we call ultraviolet. Any time a magnet wiggles, no matter how small it is, or how fast or slow it wiggles, it makes some kind of light. Most light is made by little magnets called molecules, and our eyes are tuned to a very narrow range of it. Our vision is centered on the 550 stuff we call green, because we developed our vision while we were living under the canopies of giant trees that let in only the green light.
    We also have taste, touch, and smell. From birth, we alsohave the ability to detect “weightless.” We don’t like “weightless.” Unless we are in orbit, it means we are falling and going to land soon, maybe hard. If we are in orbit we are still falling, but we are moving so fast that by the time we fall to the level of the earth, the earth is behind us and we miss it and just keep on falling. We go around and around like the moon, which is also falling and sliding past at the same time. Our sense of “weightlessness” is not one of our more pleasant ones. It doesn’t have a lot of comforting familiarity of detail about it. Either you are or you aren’t falling, so it’s not much of a sensory mode by itself.
    It does, however, accentuate one more frequently acknowledged sensory mode. It accentuates waiting—that is, the sense of time passing. We can count seconds in our head. The notion of waiting and marking time becomes severely hyperactivated by the sense of falling.
    And those definite five, plus the dubious two, make up the whole of our acknowledged sensory modes. All of our windows out onto the vastness of outside, from the vantage point of our castle—prison or hermitage, depending on your personal bent—are described in our various languages in terms of those seven modes of perception.
    Our brain is accustomed to listening to the news from the windows. Our thoughts are at their clearest when the input is from our eyes, then ears, then nose—maybe nose before ears—then tongue, then skin—maybe skin before tongue. It depends on