Sensorium

senˈsôrēəmnoun

The sensory apparatus as a whole through which someone or something experiences the environment around them—feeling, seeing, smelling, hearing, sensing, etc—and use of physical and remote faculties of the mind, phenomenal and psychological perception, cognition, intelligence, and intuition. The seat of sensation.

via Google Ngram

A small bacteria can sense, crudely, in a small shape around itself—we can call this “sight” if it can respond to a light source, or “smell” if it can detect an unwanted chemical toxin nearby—and the total of its sensory range, the full addition of all its input, stretching through and combined across all its senses, is called its sensorium.

Patrick House, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness

Select Examples

Just at the end of the nineteenth century Bernard Berenson had begun a crusade ‘to endow the retinal impression with tactile values.’ There was wide awareness that photography and other technological change had abstracted the retinal impression, as it were, from the rest of the sensorium. Thus, in 1893 Adolf Hildebrand the sculptor published a small book called The Problem of Form. He insisted that true vision must be much imbued with tangibility, and that creative, aesthetic awareness was touching and making.

Marshall McLuhan, Inside the Five Sense Sensorium

The seat of consciousness – what’s known as ‘sensorium’ – exists partly as an expression of particle entanglement in higher physical dimensions. The human brain is merely a conduit

Daniel Suarez

Geographical Interest

Country-level searches for “Sensorium” over the past 5 years via GoogleTrends data