“Sensorium” refers to the totality of all senses in an organism; the sum of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—the perceptions that aid a living thing in forming a conception of its environment.
Sensorium (2014). Digital collage created & copyright © by Eric Edelman. All rights reserved.
Later psychological and medical theories assigned the functions of learning and reason to the sensorium, as well as those parts of the brain concerned with coordinating different sensory perceptions into an organism’s unified consciousness of the environment containing it.
The word sensorium was brought into English from Latin in the mid-1600’s. Originally it stood for the brain as the seat of the mind or the soul. So it would appear that the modern definition of sensorium is coming full circle.
We can regard the sensorium as being a collage—or better yet, as an assemblage—of our senses: a multidimensional collage that performs the task of assembling our sensory impressions into changing collages of the world we perceive: a meta-collage. This gives new meaning to Joseph Cornell’s quote: “Collage = Reality.”
