07/03/2022
Every Child is a 'Super-Sensory Processor'
Most of us grew up aware of our five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Some people add in intuition as their Sixth Sense. In West Africa they include the sense of balance. That's a pretty obvious oversight on our part, we wcouldn't even be able to sit up without balance. Rudolf Steiner spoke of the twelve senses, and more recently, researchers have spoken of 19+ senses. Michael Cohen lists 53 survival senses in his book "Reconnecting with Nature".
The young child takes in an estimated 4 gigabytes of sensory data per second; I don't know how they estimate that, but even 1 gigabyte of data per second would be really impressive. The child MAKES their knowledge out of the data input from their 'whole sensory experience'. For example, the child gets to know hens in an integrated way unavailable to the child reading about hens or watching a documentary about hens. When you understand this, you understand the importance of the child playing outside in nature. Nature is the humans' natural habitat while the house is 'home base', somewhere warm and safe to sleep.
In his book "Last Child in the Woods" Richard Louv uses the term "nature deficit disorder" to describe the disorder when children miss out on ALL the sensory data that grounds and informs them, the super-sensory experience that contributes to their well being and their sense of belonging. There is no known substitute experience as rich as that which nature and the outdoors offers our children, or us. In a nutshell, we are all Earthlings, we are not classroomlings to be kept in captivity.
