Focusing on variations in the sensorium across social contexts, these theorists collectively suggest that the world is explained and experienced differently depending on the specific "ratios of sense" that members of a culture share in the sensoria they learn to inhabit (Howes 1991, p. 8). More recent work has demonstrated that individuals may include in their unique sensoria perceptual proclivities that exceed their cultural norms; even when, as in the history of smell in the West, the sense in question is suppressed or mostly ignored (Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994).