Savoring Your Five Senses
It is springtime, folks, and I don’t know about you but I am relishing the swaying flowers, cut grass, the sounds of kids in the park. I am savoring them all the more having just talked with Gretchen Rubin -- bestselling author of The Happiness Project -- about her new book Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World.
Listen to the episode on Spotify, above, on Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Last week, in our conversation with Paul Bloom, we learned about the limitations of the human brain. Our memories are sieves, our reasoning is biased. But our senses — sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch — are astonishingly high-fidelity, which is why more than a third of your brain is devoted to processing them. The world around us has the potential to bedazzle, entrance, trigger a state of rapture. If only we pay attention.
But this paying attention business is not easy. Not easy for me, for you ... and not easy for Gretchen Rubin. So she decided to do something about it. She forced herself to get out of her head, as she says in her subtitle, and into the world. She studied the art of perfume-making, hosted ketchup taste-test parties, and visited The Metropolitan Museum of Art every day for a year and counting.
Our conversation forced me to ask myself, what sounds, sights, smells, tastes and touch do I delight in? Apparently, I like sunlight shining through a water glass ...
领英推荐
I like symmetry ... and the smell of fresh paint.
I love the memory of the sight, sound, smell and feeling of my old air cooled 911 (sold years ago) ...
And more than anything, apparently, I like the resistance, the ping, and the smell of a fresh can of tennis balls ...
What sense experiences do it for you? Listen to my conversation with Gretchen, and share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
writer - coach - entrepreneur - troublemaker
1 年Loved it, Ruf. And as I was listening, I was simultaneously hearing you and guest talk about your sense experience, and then experience my sense memories that were triggered by the discussion, and also imagining the endless array of other listeners. Here was my oddest: the very distinct scent of the plastic that my ventriloquist dummies were made of. I can still smell them now! Inspired by the conversation, taking the kids to a museum later today.
Thinking of unlikely sights / sounds / smells that delight me — how about the billowing storm clouds triggered by the pouring of milk into iced coffee? Still transfixes me every time …
Healthcare, Governance and Management Organiser
1 年Happy the Spring to you and a Happy Eid-ul-Fitr as well, we've been in Spring for the past couple of months and it's amazingly wonderful and now we're in to summer though kept cool yet with rains yet.
VP of Content Development at Next Big Idea Club
1 年So great having you on the show Gretchen Rubin!
I am going to be very interested in hearing other peoples unlikely favorite sights, smells, sounds, tastes and sensations Alex Fowler Amanda Griscom Little Bronson Griscom Warren St. John Michael J. KovnatCurtis D. Ravenel Leif Ueland Jay Haynes Andy Sack Andrew L. Shapiro Alisa Volkman and friends... this is a fun one.