In the last decade, the field of sensory history has made great strides in advancing understandings of the historical and cultural articulations of human ways of knowing. While this body of scholarship has been helpful in broadening our understanding of complex histories infused by the human senses, it nonetheless treats the continents with an uneven hand, largely ignoring the non-Western world. A preliminary ‘history through photographs’, this chapter mobilizes historical sources only recently located and digitally preserved in Mizoram to explore how upland encounters with Christianity were also encounters of the senses. The chapter is organized into six related sections of human knowing: hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, touching, and the upland harhna (or ‘awakening’). By including a sixth ‘sense’ - the non-biological but still sensory-charged world of the historical upland harhna - we can attempt to approach the earliest Christians on their own terms, remaining attentive both to the diversity of sense broadly defined and to the potential hamfistedness of traditional Western models applied without due reflexivity to sensory cultures in other world regions. Paying special attention to the human senses in zo ram reveals a thicker and more highland-specific understanding of how Christianity in the Lushai Hills became a specifically and overwhelmingly Lushai Hills Christianity.

Chapter 6 examines a different kind of bodily anomaly which informed some of the early modern period’s most influential thinking on cognition and nociception – phantom limb syndrome. This curious phenomenon is clearly described in texts by Ambroise Paré. It comes to the fore, however, in the work of René Descartes, who found in this bodily anomaly a fascinating test case for his theory of ‘non-resemblance’ in the senses. As I explore, the nature of phantom limbs seemed to Descartes to confirm his idea that pain sensations occurred in the mind rather than in the body, thus reaffirming his notion of the body as object. In this capacity, phantom limbs occur in other contemporary texts, including in the first known autobiographical description of phantom limb syndrome. Looking closely at Descartes’ published works and correspondence, however, we can see how the strangeness of phantom limbs challenged this philosopher to re-examine his own thinking about perception and the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.

It has become manifest across the biological sciences that culture is a dynamic component of human brain–body formation and experience. Culture is essential to understanding questions of neuroplasticity, emotional development, interoception, epigenetics, predictive coding, facial recognition, empathy, and so on, yet culture itself is often reduced by those sciences that have come to depend on it. It is "the exterior," or it is "input." The "world," insofar as it introduces contingency to what it is to be human, is not in itself understood as contingent. What happens when culture – both a cause and an effect of human formation – is itself situated, disrupted, historicized? Historians hold the keys to a radical interdisciplinary engagement that complicates the question of culture in ways complementary to the biological disruption of interiority. The cultural brain is an historical artefact. Acknowledging this should change the kinds of questions asked by those who study the brain.