Jeremy Rifkin Experiences the Future
by Jeremy Rifkin
President of the Foundation on Economic Trends
©2005 Jeremy Rifkin
The Multisensory Stimulation System provides an opportunity for people to reintegrate their senses and could play an important role as a new kind of learning tool (1) one designed to give the human brain a heightened sense of context. So much of contemporary learning relies almost exclusively on visual imagery and auditory signals that we risk a deep loss of the more intimate senses of taste, touch, and most importantly smell. While the visual sense is the most detached and objective of the senses, and the one most identified with aggression and expropriation, the much neglected intimate senses are far more important in establishing a sense of embeddedness between people and the larger communities and environments in which they live. (See Biosphere Politics (2))
In an era characterized by increasing globalization, complexity, and vulnerability, it is imperative to create new tools that help the individual develop a holistic mental framework. The Multisensory Stimulation System is a breakthrough technology that if used as a learning tool… and not simply as an entertainment medium… would help prepare us to more fully use the full range of senses and become more integrated with the life that surrounds.
Jeremy Rifkin Quoted
Excerpts from conversations regarding the aromaComposer and the Multisensory Stimulation System
“This is exactly what you would see in a sci-fi movie. You want something like this to be an aid and an assist in everything from health to learning.”
“If this could be a tool in learning and in health, physical and mental health, “You’ve opened up an unbelievable frontier.
JR on Scent & Senses
“They say that memory in the brain is triggered by smell.”
“The most intimate experiences in memory, when you’re a little kid, always is conjured up by smell; it’s the smell. If you go to the more intimate senses, smell would be first, then taste, then touch I guess, then sound, then visual. It’s more powerful because it’s a more intimate sense.”
“Music can create all the various moods, the way the body changes with the music – aroma would do the same thing.”
“How ’bout for patients who can’t get out … (of a hospital) …In a hospital you’re denied all the life affirming smells that integrate human nature.”
Jeremy Rifkin on Digital Multisensory Control
Jeremy Rifkin: “It also has specific advantages that in a controlled situation that you can’t do in nature. What Doug’s got here that’s important here, is that “If you can create different combinations and keep it digitally controlled, it allows you to do clinical studies of people, where you can start to see results in specific disorders. Because you got everything controlled digitally, it’s quantifiable. That’s a big deal, that just opens up an enormous new area.”
“The next step, bring people together. Need the disciplines to create programs. Educators too.”
“One of the best business plans that I have ever seen.”
Notes:
1) “Learning tools” can help us learn to feel good. They can teach us how to relax, how to let go of stress, how to heal ourselves, and can lead each of us toward realization of our authentic self.
2) These concepts are explored in depth within Jeremy Rifkin’s book, “Biosphere Politics”
