Did know that your brain’s sensory network “has dedicated real estate and takes up most of the back of your brain?” The problem is that you don’t practice using your senses enough according to Dr. Norman Farb, author of Better in Every Sense: How The New Science of Sensation Can Help You to Reclaim Your Life.
On my podcast, Your Outside Mindset, Farb shared that if you practice using your senses – even for 10 seconds at a time – you can develop new sensing pathways in your brain – and sensing can become your superpower.
Habit Is Your Brain’s Default Mode
Dr. Farb says that the way to change your model of the world is to let your thoughts be interrupted by sensory information. Your brain’s default mode network (DMN) automatically balances your heart rate, breathing, and grows to carry your mental habits – like thinking about what you’re doing this day and the next – the world as you expect it to be.
Using Your Sensory Network Changes Your Brain
Another brain network is the salience network triggered by the sensory network. When you are noticing a scent, a texture, a sight, a sound – you are taking in sensory information. When new sensory information comes in, it can trigger your salient network and move that forward into your brain. This is a good thing because your brain is plastic. It can change and grow no matter how old you are.
Farb says to ask yourself what is your habit to respond to these sensory interruptions? Do you try to get rid of them or do you respond to them and treat them as something important to update your models of the world? How do you do this?
Play the 10-Second Game
Farb suggest:
“Have fun. Play this 10-second game. This is a great game to play with kids. I Spy with My Little Eye is already a part of our culture and might have unexpected value. Give yourself random points every time you notice something around you that you have not noticed before. Give yourself 10 seconds to see what your eyes just slide over.”
Notice the shape of the clouds, tree top branches, or, when inside, the corners of the room, the shadow a lamp casts. Repeat the 10 seconds for taste and sound. Notice something on the inside of your body after that.
Move into Your Senses for Balance
Your senses are always available, it is just not your habit to move into them.
Farb tells you that these “might become magic moments when you move your mind in directions that you are not used to moving to… especially when you are feeling overwhelmed, make a game of moving into sensation for balance.”
Your Attention Is Your Superpower
You have a lot of power over what shows up in your life in each moment – if you are intentional – rather than be drawn along by your habits that we already have – you can lay new tracks in your brain. You can update your view of the world by simply noticing the world around you.
Dr. Farb says that you can have stewardship over what your life is like; otherwise other people will control what your life is like – so that your sense of well-being will be dictated by someone else deciding what you should pay attention to. Noticing is a choice. What you pay attention to is what your world becomes.
It’s a challenge, but you can choose to pay attention to something sensory in your environment. If something negative is happening at that moment it might allow you to see how you might approach this from a different path.
The moment you experience agency in the world is when you decide what you are going to bring into your field of representation…. what you are going to pay attention to.
How Does This Change Your Brain?
When you do this you are leaving trails – “leaving footprints like a bridge extended – when you are mindful, attending to your breath and body – parts of the brain start to pay attention to each other – automatically treating sensations in the body as salient and giving them a chance to show up,” says Farb. This means that the reach of your brain is expanding by including other areas.
The dark side, Farb reminds us, “is that if you think of this diagnosis, this failed relationship, this layoff, this financial concern, that is what will pop up automatically. If you deeply lay habits of paying attention to those things, eventually the world will show up in a different way. So attention is like leaving a trail… without introspection (being aware of this) we think this is the way the world is – this is the way I am – this is the way I am supposed to respond.”
A Little About Dr. Farb
Norman Farb, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where he directs the Regulatory and Affective Dynamics laboratory. He studies the cognitive neuroscience of well-being, focusing on mental habits, such as how we think about ourselves and interpret our emotions.
Together with Prof. Zindel Segal, he wrote Better in Every Sense, a book that describes the surprising role of sensation in mental health. His current research explores online interventions to support wellbeing, and neuroimaging of interoception, our sense of the body’s internal state.
In my podcast interview with Dr. Farb he said, “Sometimes we might wish we had a superpower. We do have a superpower and that is our attention – what goes into our awareness matters, and we can still select what that is.”
Test Drive Your Senses:
How do you respond to sensory interruptions of sight, smell, taste, sound or touch? Would you be open to play the 10-second game of noticing? Give yourself random points every time you notice something around you that you have not noticed before. Repeat the 10 seconds for taste and sound. Would you take the time to notice something on the inside of your body (interoception) after playing the 10 second sense game?
