Ask the Author: Ransom Stephens
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Ransom Stephens
The idea for The Sensory Deception came from a newspaper article: "A polar bear that swam more than 200 miles in near-freezing waters to reach Iceland was shot on arrival."
I started wondering: what if people could experience the struggles of endangered animals? Would it alter their perspective? Change their politics?
Then I got the idea for "sensory saturation." The concept of sensory saturation comes from something we've all experienced: panic. When you're in an emergency situation, your awareness focuses on right now; no more than a second ahead or behind. If we could keep the here and now but remove the panic, you'd find yourself in the state of mind of intelligent nonlinguistic animals. Mammals and birds make decisions based on past experience, but they don't have the processing power to contemplate or reflect on those experiences. Sensory saturation is a threshold beyond which the brain is so overwhelmed by sensory data that it switches gears from reflective thinking to the immediate process-and-response that animals experience.
Once my research confirmed the validity of sensory saturation, sensory deception was kind of obvious. From there, it was just daydreaming up a Farley Mowat-like protagonist and a Heath Ledger's Joker-like antagonist and the plot sort of took on its own.
I started wondering: what if people could experience the struggles of endangered animals? Would it alter their perspective? Change their politics?
Then I got the idea for "sensory saturation." The concept of sensory saturation comes from something we've all experienced: panic. When you're in an emergency situation, your awareness focuses on right now; no more than a second ahead or behind. If we could keep the here and now but remove the panic, you'd find yourself in the state of mind of intelligent nonlinguistic animals. Mammals and birds make decisions based on past experience, but they don't have the processing power to contemplate or reflect on those experiences. Sensory saturation is a threshold beyond which the brain is so overwhelmed by sensory data that it switches gears from reflective thinking to the immediate process-and-response that animals experience.
Once my research confirmed the validity of sensory saturation, sensory deception was kind of obvious. From there, it was just daydreaming up a Farley Mowat-like protagonist and a Heath Ledger's Joker-like antagonist and the plot sort of took on its own.
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