The Sensory Disconnect

I remember visiting the Miami rail scene for the first time as if it were yesterday. No photo, video, or television screen could match the all-encompassing sensory experience of seeing it in person. The heat, breeze, humidity, sounds, smell, and impossible-to-define energy completely transcended any previous ways I’d thought of it. It was the same on my first visits to LA and Brooklyn.


In recent years I’ve become increasingly aware of the vast divide between experiencing a place in person versus seeing it in a photograph.  I call it the sensory disconnect.  It sort of sucks to be honest with you.   I’ll often notice it on vacation or a day trip.  You’ll be loving an experience or vista laying in front of you and take a photo of it.  You look at your screen and go, “hmmm that doesn’t capture what I’m feeling and experiencing right now”.  You re-take the shot with different focal lengths.  Same result.  It’s just not the same. On the positive side, it works in reverse.  I can vividly remember visiting a place that I’d previously only seen in photos and being awestruck by how much better the sensory experience of seeing it in person is.  Light years, night and day different.  It’s the size, the feel, the sounds, the way a place just wraps around you.    It’s always millions of times better in person. 

There’s a direct correlation to how this affects our modeling experience.  Even if a person could masterfully model a given scene in miniature, it will never, ever give you the same experience as seeing it in person.  It’s interesting how this plays out in op. sessions.  When I visit a layout based on an area I’ve been to, somehow I enjoy it just a bit more than a perfect layout of a place I’ve never seen.  The reverse is a problem also.  If you have a group of operators over, I struggle with how I can give them the feeling of being in Miami or LA if they’ve never been there.  I don’t think you really can.  No matter how hard you try, to them, they’re looking at nicely arranged pieces of plastic.

Taking track-level photos of your model helps but only a little.  Taping prototype photos of scenes on the backdrop during op. session helps…..a bit.  I’ve read a lot of blogs and forum posts on photography sites where the discussion focuses on which lens size is closest to what the eye sees.  The forum discussions tend to go in circles with no real consensus.    The bottom line for me is that there isn’t  a specific lens size that provides the magic bullet to bridge the gap that much.  I have noticed in some rail fan videos where the videographer is low and closer to the tracks the imagery is more like being there in person.  Larger screens, such as in a movie theater, get you closer.

I built the model of the structure at 4722 Everett Avenue in LA many years before actually seeing it in person. When I finally did have a chance to stand in front of it, my immediate reaction was, “Wow, this thing is gigantic!” The mental impact was just so different than looking at the four-inch tall piece of plastic on my layout.

To an extent bridging the sensory gap is an unsolvable problem.  I’ve been rolling this over in my mind for a while and come to the conclusion that there is only one thing that gets you pretty close and that’s visiting the actual place in person.  Experience the sights, sounds, smells, and panoramas and register those sensory experiences in your mind. Create vivid memories.  When you do this, your brain makes an A-to-B connection when you look at your layout.  When you look at your models your mind ratchets back to the real life experience.  In the past, I never gave it that much thought but in recent years I’ve become increasingly aware of how much visiting the sites I model improves my modeling of them and my overall enjoyment of the hobby in general.


A note to my overseas readers that model the US.  I understand that visiting here is a significant investment of time and money.  For those that can swing it, I highly encourage doing so.  If you’re seriously considering such a trip, drop me an email and I’ll try to offer suggestions as to how to make the trip as productive as possible.  For switching and branchline modelers you want to visit cities where you have the best chance of getting a lot of shots in a short period of time.  This would mean places like Miami, Baltimore, or LA.

6 thoughts on “The Sensory Disconnect

  1. Dave Eggleston

    This is such an important topic. Our brains fill in gaps in what we see since we can’t take it all in: there just isn’t the bandwidth in our vision’s circuitry to do so and the brain fills in the information that isn’t captured. We don’t realize this and over time we believe that this enhancing brain-created data plus what we can collect is what really is in front of us. But other people don’t fill in data gaps with the same data in their brains in the same way and perceive it differently. And cameras don’t at all, with the result you talk to. Perception is not a hard reality.

    Perception of the same thing varies from person to person. Cezanne struggled with bringing this realization of perceptual difference into art with interesting but abstracted reality. In order to create our model scenes we have to accept that at best we have to make compromises or resort to abstraction between what we think we see and what the camera shows us. Especially trying to replicate a scene in a limited, compromised space. That effort is where the craft of modeling wanders into art, if done effectively (and that effectiveness is still subjective based on others’ perceptions–but are we modeling for others or for ourselves?).

    I don’t think this issue is solvable with camera optics thanks to these technical and biological realities. Cameras are a swag at best, an important, useful, revealing tool but not necessarily THE answer. But often it’s all we have.

    I fully agree this means visit if possible. Or do so where it is a close approximation. One of my interests is 19th century west coast desert railroads. As I dove deeper I wanted to understand the experience better, to enhance the scant photographic remains and take the field trips into the desert further. I finally bit the bullet and trekked to Argentina to ride steam trains in the Patagonian desert. I spent a lot of time alone, in the coach and on the footplate watching things, absorbing sound and smell, freezing or over heating, talking to crew and even helped chase down an armadillo for the crew’s dinner. No picture I took of the trek approximates what I still see in my head. But they are important in jogging the memories and filling in gaps.

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  2. Peter Pfotenhauer

    For Miami, Lance, run a space heater and humidifier in the summer in your layout room, get some custom made scratch and sniff strips of the smells along the tracks, oh, and put a live chicken in a plastic bag under the layout somewhere it can be stepped on.

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  3. Steve Lee

    Your post gave form to my own experience with the real world-model railroad Sensory Disconnect.
    I recently had the sublime experience of riding the narrow gauge rails of Switzerland. I recommend an RhB and/or MOB trip to anyone—interesting trains and breathtaking vistas, and a friendly, inviting country.
    I sought out the experience because of photos, videos and models. Indeed, up to the time of the Switzerland trip, my intention had been to launch an HOm or Om Swiss narrow gauge layout project. However, the sensory experience of actual contact with these prototypes—which I still admire and would return to for another journey—reversed my enthusiasm for modeling Swiss narrow gauge. My total spatial and sensory experience was overwhelming, and in my judgment, very difficult to reproduce, practically, in miniature. Photos and videos alone had not really afforded me this insight.
    The vertical topography, the prominence of mountain and sky backgrounds, and constant, visible changes of grade and track curvature be achievable as a layout in a very large and impractical space. However, the convergence of resources needed to do Swiss narrow gauge right—if it’s even possible to model to accurately replicate my lived, sensory experience—has disqualified it from my future modeling plans. (Now to dispose of a small collection of Bemo HOm cars and locos…)
    It’s not particularly disappointing, as there are still lots of thrilling modeling opportunities that I can engage.

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    1. Lmind1 Post author

      However, you did in fact, visit the site in person. The end result being the mental imprint and memories that you gained from the experience.

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