Feeling the Ache of Earth in Our Bones: The Role of Sensory Anamnesis and Mammalsensing in Sustaining Planetary and Human Health

Abstract

As mammals, our most intimate and continuous relationship with the living Earth is our sensory interbeing—a co-evolved, embodied intelligence I call “mammalsensing.” This article argues that planetary and human health are grounded in this foundational sensory reciprocity between humans and nature. Yet, in the West, the historical prioritization of sight and objectivity as the most reliable and trustworthy means to “know” the world—originating in the Greek theory of a hierarchy of the senses—has fragmented our perceptual faculties and disconnected our cognitive processes from our Earth-bound mammalsensing intelligence, resulting in a form of selective sensory amnesia: a culturally created condition of disconnection from the living world that contributes to ecological estrangement, climate inaction, and psychological distress. To address this, I introduce sensory anamnesis—a relational and reparative practice of remembering our full immanent multisensory intelligence. Rooted in embodied experience, interoception, and neuroception, sensory anamnesis reactivates dormant perceptual pathways and reweaves our kinship with the Earthworld. Drawing from ecopsychology, neuroscience, Indigenous, and relational epistemologies, this article explores how recovering our mammalsensing can restore a felt sense of ecological belonging, nervous system coherence, ethical attunement, and responsiveness. In doing so, it offers not only a healing modality but also a participatory ethics of care and interdependence essential to both human and planetary flourishing.

Keywords

Mammalsensing—Selective sensory anamnesis—Planetary health—Ecological belonging—Sensory amnesia—Relational epistemology—Intradependence—Interdependence—Multisensory intelligence—Polyvagal theory—Ecological grief—Neuroception—Interoception—Ethics of care

Introduction

Being mammals, our most intimate relationship with nature is our sensory interbeing with the living Earthworld: catching the scent of rain before it falls, tasting a sweet strawberry’s invitation to eat more, reflexively spitting out rancid juice, or immediately moving away from the growl of a crouched dog or running blindly as fast as we can at the first sight of a returning loved one. Before our cognition names or explains and “makes known” what is occurring, our mouth knows to refuse or accept; our body smells, hears, or neuroceptively senses and sends us in a direction.¹ This mammalian, multisensory, and embodied intelligence, which I refer to as our mammalsensing, has co-evolved over millennia with all life in concert with the cycles and seasons of the living Earth. It encompasses a felt sense of dwelling² and relating and undergirds a lived ethos of reciprocity and responsibility as one of many alive, togethering, on the Earth (Barad, 2007; Barsalou, 2008; Coletta, 2023; Escobar, 2016; Ingold, 2011; Kimmerer, 2013; Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Siegel, 2022). As our original and most immediate mode of nature/human relating, mammalsensing is both the core and the condition of our innate kinship with and ecological belonging to the living Earthworld.

As human mammals, we have also evolved as cognizers and creators of Thoughtworlds of meaning and imaginaria. We first sense the world and we then “make sense” cognitively of what we have sensed directly (Damasio, 1999; Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Negri, Castiglioni, Caldiroli, & Barazzetti, 2022; Nes, 2021; Tomasello, 2019). What we perceive through our mammalsensing is much more than a simple precursor to what we cognize—it is constitutive of it (Gallagher 2005); Negri et al., 2022; Nes, 2021; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 2017).³ Our mammalsensing provides the raw data which our cognitive processes weave into ideas, concepts, and abstractions (Barsalou, 2008; Damasio, 1999; Ingold, 2000; McGilchrist, 2021; Siegel, 2022; Varela et al., 2017). These cognitive weavings become our worldviews—our culturally constructed and historically located ways of thinking, which then are enacted in our everyday lived customs and ways of participating in our culturally diverse worlds (Kearney, 1984; McGilchrist, 2021; Varela et al., 2017). It is this intimate nature/human entangling of our Earth-bound mammalsensing intelligence and our capacity to cognize that I propose is both a cause and, importantly, a potential remedy for the interwoven planetary and human crises of disease, dysphoria, and ecosystem dysregulation.

I argue that in the West, we have decoupled our mammalsensing and our cognizing, primarily as a consequence of the historical theorizing of a hierarchy of the senses. This model, which characterizes sight as a more truthful, objective “higher sense” while subordinating others as less trustworthy, subjective, and “lower,” has shaped Western dominant scientific and educational discourses since the Greeks. The reinforcing of a hierarchical and reductive understanding of the senses has had consequences which extend beyond individual lived experience; it has shaped what counts as “knowing” (Howes & Classen, 2014; Levin, 1993; Pallasmaa, 2005), narrowed how we interrelate with the Earthworld, and restricted the range of raw material for reimagining how we might respond, both practically and ethically, to our planetary and human health crises. At a time when the challenges of ecological and climate disruptions require the application of all our sense-abilities, we find ourselves in a state of selective sensory amnesia,⁴ disconnected from our most intimate source of Earth-related information which has evolved specifically for perceiving the multidimensional complexities of our Earthworld.

To address this condition of selective sensory amnesia, I introduce sensory anamnesis as a practice for recovering access to our full, innate embodied intelligence—bringing back into our ken those ways of knowing which we have learned to discount and ignore as subjective and untrustworthy (Classen, 2012; Howes, 2003; Siegel, 2022). Sensory anamnesis involves intentional, experiential practices rooted in embodied, relational perception, which invite our dormant and disregarded mammalian senses to once again inform our ways of knowing the living world. Through such practices of mammalsensing, we may begin to re-attune our Western perceptual capacities toward a fuller multisensory awareness of place and presence—an intelligence long cultivated within and through a multiplicity of lifeways of specific Indigenous peoples in relation to their particular lands, waters, and more-than-human kin (Cajeté, 1994; Escobar, 2018; Fals Borda, 1984; Fienup-Riordan & Rearden, 2012; Simpson, 2014; Smith, Maxwell, Pihama, & Doherty, 2023).⁵

Expanding our current Western sight-dominant epistemology to include all our mammalsensing modalities as legitimate and trustworthy forms of knowing broadens not only what we have to think with but also how we think (Abram, 1996; Abram & Hine, 2024; Barad, 2007; Classen, 2012; Howes, 2003; Milstein, Castro-Sotomayor, & Abram, 2020; Siegel, 2022). It rekindles our felt sense of ecological belonging within the nested and layered ecosystems of the planet, reestablishing our felt kinship with the Earthworld and potentially healing the epidemics of anxiety and depression that accompany the pervasive sense of unbelonging in the West today (Clayton, 2020; Siegel, 2022).

This article begins by exploring mammalsensing as a fundamental evolutionary and ecological element of nature/human relating. A brief description follows of smell, touch, taste, hearing, vision, neuroception, and interoception and their singular contributions to relational knowing. The historical construction of the hierarchy of the senses and its contemporary consequence, selective sensory amnesia, is then outlined. Next, it introduces sensory anamnesis as a practice for re-awakening our full mammalian sensorium. The article concludes by arguing that by restoring and attending to our full mammalsensing intelligence through the practice of sensory anamnesis, we make available to our cognitive intelligence worlds of fresh information from which to craft new ways to respond to the ecological and climate crises of the day. In essence, our mammalsensing is the medium though which we feel—and importantly may discover novel ways to heal—the ache of the Earth which we sense in our bones.

Mammalsensing: Our Innate Sensory Intelligence

Honed over 300,000 years of co-evolving with all life and in concert with the Earth’s cycles and seasons, our mammalsensing intelligence is much more than just a set of physical channels for passively perceiving sensory information, which is then handed over to cognition for analysis. Rather, it is a complex multisensory, integrative process entangled in the active participatory process of relating (Howes & Classen, 2014; Negri et al., 2022; Nes, 2021; Siegel, 2022). Mammalsensing is the means through which we experience a felt physiological coherence and kinship with the living world (Abram, 1996; Classen, 1993; Howes, 2005; McGilchrist, 2019; Milstein et al., 2020; Porges, 2011; Spence, 2011). Via mammalsensing, we directly relate to the living world, which is continually communicating to us through smells, sounds, touch, taste, temperature, pressure, and internal bodily sensations (Fox et al., 2020; Lefale, 2010; Montagu, 1986; Porges, 2011; Siegel, 2012). Our mammalsensing orients us in the now, coordinating and corroborating information about our surroundment and the relational dynamics therein, directly informing us as to whether we are safe or threatened, how to relate and with whom and what, and what direction to go for food, shelter, friendship, and safety. (Barrett, 2017; Howes & Classen, 2014; Porges, 2011; Sherrington, 1906; Siegel, 2012).

As numerous empirical studies of migratory birds (Hore & Mouritsen, 2016), hummingbirds (Baldwin et al., 2014), salmon (Madsen, Winther, Bollinger, Steiner, & Larsen, 2019), sea turtles (Lohmann & Lohmann, 2019), rodents (Murata, Itakura, & Touhara, 2024), and mammals and birds in general (Roura and Navarro, 2018) have shown, sensing is a form of direct knowing. Sensing in humans is no exception.⁶ Integrating multisensory inputs is central to how we relate within and come to know our environments (Spence, 2011; Stein & Stanford, 2008).⁷ It is our first and primary bond with the Earthworld. This collaborating of all our sensory capacities is a form of knowing with the now; it is what allows us to feel at home—or out of place.

What counts as “sensing” varies across places and cultures, such that different cultures distinguish and name their own unique set of senses (Dell, 2021; Rose, 1996; Whyte, 2017). The categorization of the human senses into the five traditional modes—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—is a Western cultural construct rooted in philosophical and historical traditions and not a fixed biological fact (Gapenne, 2014; Howes, 2005; Howes & Classen, 2014). In this article, mammalsensing refers to the Western classically defined five senses,⁸ neuroception (Porges, 2011), and interoception (Craig, 2002; Siegel, 2012, 2022).⁹

Five Senses, Five Intelligences: Knowing with the Now

Smell

Smell is a particularly sensitive and ancient sense that enables humans to detect environmental changes before they become visually apparent. Olfaction links us to the chemistry of the Earth. The scent of fresh rain or the blooming of flowers can indicate a thriving ecosystem, whereas the musty odor of decay often signals disruption or decomposition (Xiao, Tait, & Kang, 2020). Smell is key to navigation, memory, and environmental awareness. Indigenous knowledge systems use scent to track seasonal shifts and ecological changes (Kimmerer, 2013; Smith et al., 2023). These olfactory cues now are being altered or diminished. Studies show that air pollution can mask the natural scents of a city, making it harder for residents to gauge air quality or the vitality of their surroundings (Classen, Howes, & Synnott, 1994). Changes in the distinct smell of sea air as a result of increased industrial activity and warming ocean temperatures herald measurable ecosystem damage in coastal ecosystems (Roggatz, Lorch, Hardege, & Benoit, 2019). Roggatz et al. (2022) argue that chemical signals, or “infochemicals,” are vital for ecological interactions across terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments, and that climate and ecological change has altered the production, release, transmission, and reception of these signals, leading to “info-disruption” and “nose-blindedness.”

Touch

Touch situates us in space, making the boundaries between the self and world more fluid. It is a fundamental means of direct relational knowing. Through tactile experiences such as feeling soil texture, humidity shifts, or body-to-body contact, humans develop an intimate relationship with their surroundings (Gallace & Spence, 2014). The loss of these tactile connections in urbanized environments has diminished the ability of many people to directly experience the environment. As natural spaces are being increasingly replaced by urban development, the absence of these tactile experiences furthers environmental disengagement (Cardinale et al., 2012; Soga, Gaston, & Yamaura, 2017).

Hearing

Sound surrounds and immerses us in place, allowing us to detect the local presence of predators, changes in weather, and disruptions in ecosystems in ways that vision alone cannot (Krause, 2012; Pijanowski et al., 2011). Birds and insects serve as ecological monitors; changes in their calls or their absence indicates shifts in biodiversity. Many animals, including humans, rely on auditory patterns to recognize seasonal changes, such as the return of migratory birds in the spring/fall (Farina & James, 2016; Slabbekoorn & Ripmeester, 2008). The absence of the insect hum indicates a disrupted ecosystem (Buxton et al., 2021).

Sound offers a dynamic and immediate link to the environment, providing real-time information that can convey emotional undertones, such as the alarm in an animal’s call or the calm of a flowing stream (Kang et al., 2023). As biodiversity declines due to climate change, many of these sounds are fading, marking the loss not only of species but also of environmental signals of disease and ecosystem disruption. Urban noise pollution has exacerbated this issue, drowning out information-laden natural sounds (Slabbekoorn & Ripmeester, 2008) for a multiplicity of living species, especially birds (Derryberry, Phillips, Derryberry, Blum, & Luther, 2020; Engel, Young, Davies, Waddington, & Wood, 2024).

Taste

We are born into worlds of taste (Spence, 2011). Taste is a form of local biochemical literacy. Taste guides us toward nourishment and warns of toxicity. The bitterness of unripe or poisonous plants signals caution, whereas sweetness often indicates safe, high-energy foods. We can “taste” climate and ecological change, as it alters plant chemistry, affecting the taste profiles of food sources for both humans and animals (Tubiello, 2015). As climate change disrupts agricultural patterns, the flavors and textures of food are also changing, reflecting the broader ecological shifts occurring in the environment (Foley et al., 2011; Vermeulen, Campbell, & Ingram, 2012). The erosion of plant and animal biodiversity due to habitat destruction and climate change directly impacts the variety and quality of food available to humans and, therefore, human health (Tubiello et al., 2015). Ecological degradation and food insecurity are intertwined, with the soil, our health, and our culinary traditions bearing the brunt of these changes (Amundson et al., 2015; Pörtner, Karl, Boyd, Cheung, & Lluch-Cota, 2014).

Vision

Unlike touch or taste, seeing allows the gathering of information about objects and spatial relationships without any physical contact. It is called a Distance Sense because it doesn’t require direct contact with the object being sensed (Goldstein, 2019). Food sources, predators, mates, and shelter can all be seen from afar, thus affording a temporal buffer to anticipate and react to threats and opportunities. This is crucial for survival, as it allows for decision-making before contact (Jay, 1993).

But seeing has its drawbacks and vulnerabilities. It can be deceived by optical illusions and mirages. It often ignores what’s outside the visual field and background information that the viewer’s bias deems unimportant. It privileges surfaces, potentially overlooking deeper layers accessible by touch, smell, or hearing. It disconnects in situations where tactile or relational sensing would offer more ecological information (Jay, 1993). The brain fills in gaps, filters distractions, and focuses on what seems relevant or meaningful (Ingold, 2000; Slagter & van Moorselaar, 2021). Of all the senses, vision depends upon corroboration from the other senses to attest to what has been caught sight of. Much of what we “see” is shaped by attention, emotion, past experience, and cultural norms (Crary, 1990; McGilchrist, 2021; Pessoa, 2013). In terms of assessing the complex signals of multidimensional ecosystem disruption, disease, and failure, eyesight is myopic.

The Expanded Sensorium: Neuroception and Interoception

Our classical understanding of our mammal sensorium has been expanded by recent discoveries in neuroscience. This article discusses two of these, neuroception and interoception—both of which are included in this article’s working definition of mammalsensing.

Neuroception

The neuroscientist Stephen Porges introduced the term neuroception in 2011 to describe the body’s capacity to detect cues of safety or threat without conscious awareness. For Porges, the body functions as the intervening variable between sensation and response. Through neuroception—a subcortical, automatic process—the autonomic nervous system continuously scans the environment, shaping not only behavioral responses but also perceptual experience (Porges, 2011). In simple terms, when the body neuroceptively registers a threat, the world is perceived as hostile—even friends and loved ones may be misread as dangerous. Conversely, in a regulated autonomic state, the same environment may feel safe and welcoming. From a mammalsensing perspective, this suggests that even before cognition interprets what is sensed, the body has already classified incoming signals as safe or threatening.

The concept of neuroception provides crucial insights into the widespread patterns of denial, paralysis, and inaction in response to ecological and climate crises. According to Porges’ polyvagal theory, the human mammalian body registers climate-related threats as existentially dangerous, often triggering a freeze response before conscious thought can intervene. This immobilization precedes the formation of narrative meaning or an ethical response. It may help explain why so many people describe a haunting dissonance: “I know what I should do, but I can’t seem to do it.” Such reactions are not evidence of apathy but rather may be signs of being overwhelmed by perceived danger and locked down in survival mode. Understanding this opens new pathways for addressing climate paralysis not only cognitively but also somatically and relationally.

Interoception

Daniel J. Siegel’s concept of interoception dovetails with Porges’ neuroception. Interoception is the process of perceiving internal physiological states (e.g., heart rate, breath, gut feeling), which informs self-awareness, emotional regulation, and social attunement. Seigel emphasizes that developing the capacity for interoception increases empathy, compassion, and a felt sense of belonging—all key to feelings of responsibility and care and well-being (Siegel, 2012).

Siegel also introduces the concept of intraconnectedness—the notion that the mind is an emergent, relational, and embodied process rather than an isolated entity confined to the brain. He argues that sensing, emotion, and bonds to both human and other-than-human co-create one’s sense of moral responsibility, well-being, and ecological belonging, such that the sense of “me” is an emergent quality of being in relationship as “we.” Interoception supports vertical integration in the human person by linking bodily sensations with mental awareness—which becomes the groundwork for ethical behavior, compassionate engagement, and a sense of inter and intraconnectedness and relational responsibility (Siegel, 2022).

Digital worlds, dulled senses

In our contemporary world, the richness of our mammalsensing has been dulled—if not deadened—by the influence of digital technologies, synthetic environments, and widespread sensory pollution. These conditions erode the depth and nuance of our embodied engagement with the living world (Bull, 2000; Rosen, 2024). Compounding this is the dominance of cultural narratives that elevate vision and disembodied objectivity as the highest forms of knowing, at the expense of other sensory, embodied forms of awareness (Classen, 1993; Daston & Galison, 2007; Howes, 2005; Ingold, 2000). As such, we are no longer in sync with ecological rhythms—which diminishes our ability to comprehend fully the ecological signals of health and disease. It also weakens our sense of ecological belonging and the related feelings of ethical responsibility and care and causes us to be less attuned to our own interoceptive and neuroceptive states (Abram, 1996; Milstein et al., 2020; Porges, 2011; Siegel, 2022; van der Kolk, 2014).

To recover the intelligence of our full mammalsensing is to recover our ecological and relational way of knowing through which all mammals negotiate meaning and survival. This recovery is not about romanticizing “instinct;” rather, it is about recognizing the untapped capacities within us for sensing-with the world—ones which can be reawakened through intentional practices such as sensory anamnesis and whose wisdom can be applied to deriving solutions to our human and planetary health crises.

A Brief History of the Western Hierarchy of the Senses and Its Modern Sequelae: Sensory Amnesia

In the West, beginning with the Greeks, extending through the 17th century Scientific Revolution, and continuing into today’s screen-saturated, vision-oriented world, our human senses have not been considered equal; rather, sight has been elevated above the other senses as the most rational, objective, and trustworthy mode of perception (Classen, 1993; Daston & Galison, 2007). This prioritization of sight has profoundly shaped Western objectivist epistemologies, scientific methodologies, and cultural values—privileging observation over participation and separation over relationality (Classen, 1993; Howes, 2003; Jay, 1993). Understanding the historical roots of this sensory hierarchy reveals not only its philosophical underpinnings but also its consequences for how humans relate today to the world, to knowledge, to each other, and to other beings.

Classical foundations: Sight as the rational sense

The privileging of vision has deep roots in classical Greek philosophy. Plato conceived the senses as unreliable pathways to truth, favoring instead the inner eye of reason and intellect. He argued that the senses, particularly touch and taste, were tied to the body’s appetites and thus corrupted the soul’s pursuit of truth; sight, however, was an exception—capable of facilitating philosophical contemplation and connection to eternal forms (Plato, 2008). For Aristotle, sight was the most informative and least corporeal sense, enabling humans to attain knowledge about universal qualities and not just particulars (Aristotle, 1986). Smell, taste, and touch—associated with physical intimacy and animal instincts—were demoted as inferior or “lower” senses. This foundational bias laid the groundwork for the division between “higher” intellectual senses and “lower” bodily ones (Jütte, 2005).

The Christian Middle ages: Spiritual vision and the body as sinful

The Christian theological tradition absorbed and amplified this sensory dualism. St. Augustine held that seeing God with the soul was superior to bodily perception. Sensory indulgence was seen as a distraction from divine truth: to see was to aspire to God; to touch or taste was to risk sin. Thus, Augustine introduced a moral dimension to the hierarchy of the senses, which was then formalized in medieval scholasticism (Classen, 1993). Sight and hearing, less involved with bodily contact, were thought to facilitate rational discourse and religious learning, and touch, taste, and smell were associated with earthly desires and female or animalistic embodiment, thus rendering the hierarchy of the senses not only epistemological but also spiritual and gendered (Classen, 1993, 1998).

The Enlightenment and seeing scientifically

The supremacy of sight influenced what types of scientific instruments were developed in the Enlightenment for scientific work. The telescope and microscope were designed to technologically extend the scientist’s sight. As science became “the” way of knowing, seeing became equated with knowing. Descartes’ dualistic epistemology separated mind from body and privileged the “clear and distinct ideas” of the rational intellect—ideas verified through visual observation (Descartes, 1996). Francis Bacon’s empirical methods similarly emphasized “objective” observation, reinforcing the authority of the detached, seeing subject (Daston & Galison, 2007). By the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant and other philosophers identified vision as the sensory correlate of reason, capable of supporting scientific objectivity and universal judgment. Vision was seen as a dispassionate “distant” sense—less prone to subjectivity or cultural variability than smell or touch—and thus became the privileged means of accessing truth (Jay, 1993).

Modernity: Blinded by sight. Seeing is knowing

The rise of modern visual technologies—photography, cinema, and surveillance systems, including medical surveillance instruments for seeing inside the body—solidified seeing as the primary way of knowing in the modern world. To see means to know. It is still common parlance to say “I see” to indicate that one has a fuller understanding of something. This cultural investment in sight has marginalized the other senses, rendering them private, emotional, or “primitive”—qualities unfit for modern, scientific knowledge and public discourse. Howes (2003) noted that the sensory hierarchy was both colonial and patriarchal; indigenous and non-Western sensory cultures that valued multisensory knowing were dismissed as irrational or premodern (Cajeté, 1994; Whyte, 2017).

The long history of privileging sight has produced a selective sensory amnesia that distorts our relationship with the living world. One of the most insidious consequences of this Western epistemology—which disembodies knowledge and distances the knower from the world being known (Howes, 2003)—is that we come to “see” ourselves as detached observer-subjects rather than as one of many participants “togethering” within ecosystems (Abram, 1996, 2010; Barad, 2007; Daston & Galison, 2007). In turn, the Earth and its more-than-human inhabitants are rendered as objects—things to be seen, possessed, extracted, or utilized by us, the presumed objective observers of a living planet (Fideler, 2014; Haraway, 1988; Plumwood, 1993). In this worldview, we are alienated from the very ground of our belonging. We come to live “on” Earth, not with it or any of the Earth’s inhabitants, imagining ourselves as isolated owners of belongings rather than as entangled participants who themselves belong to the evolving, animate Earthworld (Kimmerer, 2013). The result is severance from the felt sense of ecological belonging that arises when we recognize ourselves as kin within a web of interdependent life (Glover, 2024; Siegel, 2022; Simpson, 2014).

Selective sensory amnesia: Consequences for planetary and human ill-health

Vision alone is insufficient to perceive many of the most urgent signs of planetary ill-health. The slow violence of species extinction, soil depletion, chemical saturation, and climate destabilization unfolds beyond the visible spectrum and outside the timescale of a single human gaze (Nixon, 2011). Yet, our overdependence on vision has left us perilously insensible to these changes—and dangerously delayed in our responses.

This condition, which I call selective sensory amnesia, is not a failure of biology but a byproduct of Western epistemology. Our bodies remain exquisitely attuned to shifts in the environment; yet, cultural training in “objectivity” and disembodied cognition teach us to override or dismiss these sensory signals as “irrational,” “unreasonable,” and/or “unscientific” (Daston & Galison, 2007; LaMotte, 2016). Porges’ (2011) neuroceptive model suggests that our nervous systems are constantly scanning for cues of safety or threat. Our nonconscious, continuous somatic processes are foundational to our mammalian survival; thus, when cultural norms devalue or suppress certain of our innate sensings, we lose access to a vital source of knowing. It becomes difficult to trust what our bodies register, to articulate what we feel, or to make meaning of our unease and grief. This dissonance often manifests as confusion, fear, and even panic. While contemporary epidemics of anxiety, depression, and despair are frequently diagnosed through individualist psychological models, they may also be symptoms of a deeper ecological estrangement—appropriate responses to an unsafe world for which we have no shared explanatory framework (Albrecht, 2011; Buzzell & Chalquist, 2009; Porges, 2011).

The contemporary human body is being reshaped by exposure to artificial environments, digital overstimulation, and toxicants that affect overall health, perceptual clarity, and mood (Rosen, 2024). Interoceptive and neuroceptive signals that once connected us to the rhythms of hunger, fatigue, seasonal change, or danger are now often drowned out by screens and noise, such that we are becoming desensitized not only to the environmental cues of ecological disease but also to our own felt signals of safety and threat (Zomorodi, 2023). When we are severed from the sensory ground of our ecological belonging, unable to bridge the chasm between what we feel and what we have been taught is worthy of our attention, we suffer.

Sensory Anamnesis: Reawakening Our Mammalsensing for Planetary and Human Health

Sensory anamnesis is a lived practice for reawakening our innate, embodied sensory intelligence—particularly those senses that have been culturally suppressed in favor of sight. The term anamnesis originates from the Greek word for “not forgetting” and was used by Plato to describe a form of remembering that brings forward what the soul already knows (Plato, 2008). In this ecological and psychological reframing, sensory anamnesis refers not just to memory but also to a reconnection to our deep sensory intelligence, which has evolved in us as mammals embedded in the rhythms and relationships of living ecosystems. It invites a remembering of our relational perception of the world via all our senses. This is not simply a return to the senses but a conscious reactivation of a way of being “in” and “with” the living world—one which modern culture has numbed or forgotten (Abram, 2010; Classen, 2012; Howes, 2003).

This reawakening of a more-than-cognitive relationship with the Earthworld—one based on intraconnectedness and reciprocity and not dominion, abstraction, and control—fosters a moral orientation of care and allows us to feel the commitments of kinship and not just think them. We become more than witnesses to our world.

Sensory anamnesis supports nervous system regulation and may help heal trauma by restoring pathways of sensory connection and coherence. In the broader ecological context, reawakening our sensing can alleviate the dissociation and helplessness often associated with climate grief and ecological despair (Buzzell & Chalquist, 2009; Zylstra, Knight, Esler, & Le Grange, 2014). It offers a sensory-based path away from screen-centered, sight-dominant modes of attending and toward grounded, embodied, and relational experiences of place and belonging.

Sensory anamnesis proposes an epistemology rooted in participation, embodiment, and situatedness.¹⁰ It draws on Karen Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism, which posits that the knower and the known emerge through intra-action and not separation. This view is echoed in biosemiotics, where meaning is not fixed or symbolic but arises through dynamic, sensory exchange between living organisms and their environments (Kull, Emmeche, & Hoffmeyer, 2011; von Uexküll, 2010). Sensory anamnesis thus aligns with and contributes to a growing movement in science and philosophy toward relational, postobjectivist ways of knowing (Gallegos-Riofrío, Zent, & Gould, 2022; West, Haider, Stålhammar, & Woroniecki, 2020).

Sensory anamnesis practices and experientials

Creative expression is a powerful gateway to sensory anamnesis. Singing, playing music, drawing, and storytelling awaken sensory memory and bring forward forgotten or unspoken forms of knowing; they engage the senses in complex and layered ways, offering portals into what Oliver Sacks (1985) calls the “neurological unconscious.”

Sensory anamnesis is cultivated through intentional activities that reawaken dormant or disregarded senses and reestablish felt relationality with the Earthworld. These practices may be simple, but their effects can be profound (Baklien, Marthoenis, & Thurston, 2024; Glover, 2024; Shams & Seitz, 2008). For example, listening walks—walking slowly and silently while focusing on ambient sounds reorients our awareness away from seeing and toward hearing ecological “information” which is unavailable to our eyes: the presence or absence of birds calling and insect wings thrumming or the audible quiet of hushed or absent machinery (Kimmerer, 2013). Similarly, barefoot grounding, soil-touching, or plant-tending exercises restore tactile engagement, reactivating our connection to textures, temperatures, and the energetic rhythms of a place (Richards & White, 2021).

Olfactory re-sensitization—spending time identifying natural scents—can restore the underused sense of smell, which in mammals is deeply linked to memory and recognition (Herz, 2016). Practices that involve taste—eating local, wild, or foraged foods—can reconnect us with the specific biochemistry of a place and season. Interoceptive awareness, as developed in somatic and contemplative disciplines such as yoga, mindfulness, and breathwork, strengthens the body’s inner listening and supports emotional regulation (Mehling et al., 2011; Siegel, 2022).

Practices such as sensory storytelling, sense-based walks, and embodied ecological education can foster collective mammalsensing and reweave humans into the larger web of sensory interbeing (Talgorn & Ullerup, 2023). These experiential methods are the backbone of therapies such as ecotherapy (Jordan & Hinds, 2016), somatic ecopsychology (Buzzell & Chalquist, 2009; Somatic Nature Therapy Institute, 2025), and place-based learning (Yemini, Engel, & Ben Simon, 2023). Studying sensory anamnesis practices could also offer valuable insights into further understanding the variables at play in the relationship between human health and exposure to nature (Tomasso & Chen, 2022).

Importantly, sensory anamnesis practices may be fundamentally health-promoting acts which can foster a felt sense of belonging, repair trauma, and reorient us ethically. By recovering our full sensory palette, we move toward greater ecological attunement and responsiveness. We become more able to detect environmental distress, feel the joy of kinship, and respond appropriately to the needs of place and kin.

Conclusion

Reawakening our mammalsensing is more than a perceptual upgrade—it is a reconnection to our ecological belonging that has been obscured by modern sight-centric ways of knowing. This kinship is not metaphorical. It is sensory, biological, and existential. When we engage the world through our full mammalsensing, we remember that we are not separate from nature but participants in a living diverse matrix of relationships (Milstein et al., 2020; Cajeté, 1994; Escobar, 2016, 2018; Ingold, 2000). Kinship, in this sense, is not limited to familial or cultural ties. It is a lived recognition of shared aliveness with all life: of sensing the world as well as being sensed by it.

Sensory anamnesis practices help us reinhabit these kin relationships of reciprocity and care, which, in turn, have direct implications for planetary health. Studies on ecopsychology and environmental behavior consistently show that people who feel more connected to nature are more likely to engage in pro-environmental actions (Guazzini, Valdrighi, Fiorenza, & Duradoni, 2025; Mayer & Frantz, 2004).

We are mammals. We have not evolved to live by sight and thought alone. The ache we feel of disconnection, disease, and ecological despair is a mammalsensed awareness of our contemporary condition of being in the “wrong relation” with the living planet.¹¹ It is a deep, embodied knowing—a call to reawaken to what we know in our bones. By recovering the intelligence of our full mammalsensing through the practice of sensory anamnesis, we provide our cognition with rich, relational information for reimagining how to belong—not as detached observers but as participants in a shared and entangled Earthworld. This is not only a strategy for healing individual and collective trauma and disease but also a way to cultivate appropriate, necessary, and life-sustaining responses to ecological crises. Attending to our full range of mammalsensing intelligence reveals a pathway for re-establishing our relational bonds with the living Earthworld.

In the end, mammalsensing is about reinhabiting our place within the web of life—making-with the Earth and not merely living on it. It is a way of dwelling that sustains both individual and planetary well-being and contributes to the flourishing of all life.

Footnotes

Author Disclosure Statement

No competing financial interests exist.

Funding Information

No funding was received for this article.

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