Books for Deepening Your Senses

“I've been putting off transferring this article over from the old Words Like Silver site for forever, and the reason why is that it's now been six years since I cooked up this personal philosophy and I have a lot to add to it—as a writer, as a human being, and as someone who now knows the scientific backing to it too. I decided to transfer this one as-is and write a companion post detailing all the updates instead, so look for a multi-part series on what (else) I've been reading and thinking about that's strengthened this particular worldview.”

“There is nothing so sensible as sensual inundation. — Mary Oliver”

Everyone has a theory for happiness. If not a theory, a deeply formulated subscription. “If I have x, y, and z, I will be happy and fulfilled.”

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Mine is this:

In analyzing the times when I’ve felt super down, and the times when I’ve been ecstatically happy, there’s been a vivid divide. The times when I’ve been in a bad place have been times when everything was shot through with the feeling of sameness or numbness. It would be hard to make one day feel different from another.

Usually, my happiest moments are specific, especially if they’re simple.

One of my biggest fears—a fear that nags at me on the nights when I’m awake and worrying—is that I will forget the details. On one hand, I’m such a simplicity person. All I need is a sense of purpose, and to be able to love the people around me. But I also want to remember it all.

If you know me, you probably know that early 2019 was the worst period I’ve ever had. It felt impossible that so many tragedies could occur in a row, and I had a rough time summoning the willpower to care about anything. It was difficult to remember other times, and it was impossible to remember what being happy felt like. 2020 has been (fingers crossed) way better and easier in comparison.

For me, learning to deeply analyze my senses—and to notice the variations in them even on days when everything feels stagnant—has been a secret to my enduring happiness.

For a clear example of why this works for me:

I spent all of my senior year gloriously happy during the four minutes or so it would take for me to drive to class for my 8 A.M. Because I’ve been reading all about how music and sound affect our brains this year, I spent the entire drive deeply listening to and dissecting a song I love. Although the experience of listening could be similar, the actual songs themselves vary so drastically when you learned to dive into them.

This probably isn’t a proper term, but it’s what I call it: sensory variation.

Sensory variation is probably why I’m such a seasonal person, and so location-oriented. Each place I am carries with it such distinctive and electrifying sensations. The exact scent of the olive-oil-and-gardenia soap in a specific family member’s home. The sound of the gravel grating under sneakers during the summers. Isn’t the variety incredible?

One of my best friends was worried about stagnation when he was talking to me about it last year, because he happened to be working a job when most of his hours would be devoted to the same spot and endless workflow. How do you stay happy when everything will feel the same?

I’ve started to delve more into other senses. Taste. Touch. Scent. Sight. I’ve kept lists of sensory details ever since my nature drawing class junior year — and I’ve always kept lists of “human details” on my phone to incorporate into my fiction. Looking back at them is so refreshing. 

I pretty much stopped journaling after I learned that language can solidify false memories and feelings. I was sick of living an interior life. Being the “quiet” one.

Marking the time via senses instead feels much healthier. I’ll post a few lists on the blog this week! I rarely post my sketchbook pages on here, but would love to elaborate on what I mean.

It feels like a deeply relevant part of the human experience, especially during times like now when it feels like it’s one of the few things that we can do. If you’re ever around me in person, you’ve definitely heard me talk about it this year. Here are some book recommendations if—like me—you want a little more variation in what you observe in your day to day.

For me, at least, it makes me deeply happy to notice more.

The Book List

SCENT

Book: The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell by Luca Turin
Release Date: May 18, 2006
Publisher: Ecco

One man's passion for perfume leads him to explore one of the most intriguing scientific mysteries: What makes one molecule smell of garlic while another smells of rose?

In this witty, engrossing, and wildly original volume, author Luca Turin explores the two competing theories of smell. Is scent determined by molecular shape or molecular vibrations? Turin describes in fascinating detail the science, the evidence, and the often contentious debate--from the beginnings of organic chemistry to the present day--and pays homage to the scientists who went before. With its uniquely accessible and captivating approach to science via art, The Secret of Scent will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered about the most mysterious of the five senses.

I haven’t read this one but it’s next on my list.

This is really dorky, but I’ve never been able to use the same body wash twice. During a season of my life, I will spend agonizing moments over the shampoo bottles and body washes in the Walmart aisle, because I so vividly associate senses with specific segments of my life. I had to replace my shampoo right after my W&L experience was canceled, and it was an odd source of agony. What would I associate with my final days?

(It was a bright, tangy apple. I got deeply obsessed with having a clean house in May, and so the dish soap and lotion that I used from Public Goods will forever be imprinted on the experience.)

Maybe that’s overthinking. Many people know that scent is most closely associated with memory but few people try to consciously provoke it. And if I’m conscious of it, I can’t just ignore it.

I’ve also always loved the idea of going to a perfumerie once. I would love to know how to construct specific memories. How to evoke feelings.

TOUCH

Novel: Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky
Release Date: May 21, 2019
Publisher: Basic Books

An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought.

When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words.

In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart.

Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.

This isn’t quite about touch but it’s the closest I can get. It pretty compellingly argues that we actually think through movement. Our thoughts aren’t words that we sort through, narrated by our inner voice. Having sat through dozens of dance classes in which choreographers speak of dance as a language — with textures, punctuation, cadences, all the attributes of a voice — the argument makes instinctual sense.

My 2019 really got better once I started dancing again. For one, endorphins. For another, it was such a physical way of processing trauma. Nothing was more cathartic than moving. My senior year, I was slightly addicted to working out. That hasn’t quite reared its head as much in quarantine, but I don’t feel right if I’m not obsessively active. I’ve thought a lot about movement, habit, and other elements of occupying our physical space.

The argument that action shapes thought rather than the other way around is one I actually completely believe, after reading this, and so it’s made me much more aware of how I move and touch the outer world.

TASTE

Book: Flavor: The Science of Our Most Neglected Sense by Bob Holmes
Release Date: April 25, 2017
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company

Can you describe how the flavor of halibut differs from that of red snapper? How the taste of a Fuji apple differs from a Spartan? For most of us, this is a difficult task: flavor remains a vague, undeveloped concept that we don’t know enough about to describe—or appreciate—fully. In this delightful and compelling exploration of our most neglected sense, veteran science reporter Bob Holmes shows us just how much we’re missing.

Considering every angle of flavor from our neurobiology to the science and practice of modern food production, Holmes takes readers on a journey to uncover the broad range of factors that can affect our appreciation of a fine meal or an exceptional glass of wine. He peers over the shoulders of some of the most fascinating food professionals working today, from cutting-edge chefs to food engineers to mathematicians investigating the perfect combination of pizza toppings. He talks with flavor and olfactory scientists, who describe why two people can experience remarkably different sensations from the same morsel of food, and how something as seemingly unrelated as cultural heritage can actually impact our sense of smell.

Along the way, even more surprising facts are revealed: that cake tastes sweetest on white plates; that wine experts’ eyes can fool their noses; and even that language can affect our sense of taste. Flavor expands our curiosity and understanding of one of our most intimate sensations, while ultimately revealing how we can all sharpen our senses and our enjoyment of the things we taste.

Certain to fascinate everyone from gourmands and scientists to home cooks and their guests, Flavor will open your mind—and palette—to a vast, exciting sensory world.

While sound is definitely the sense I know the most about, and scent is perhaps the one that evokes the most emotion for me, taste is one of the easiest ways to switch up a bland day for me. More so than how we taste, I’m fascinated by how we articulate taste. This is what I learned the most about in quarantine while I was piecing together how to cook for myself every night while living alone for three months. I was proud of how I started to detect the differences in specific spices, separating and organizing flavors in my head. Even that made me excited to try new recipes rather than being frustrated by another night of cooking alone.

My little is a bit of an expert on this, and is slowly doing the same with wine. (Bonus: I started to more crisply articulate a taste for certain wines!) I love it so much, and could go down this rabbit hole forever.

Like sound and music, there’s an rich amount of scholarship about taste. Sensory works are so lovely to me because they do blend science and art so precisely, and that intersection is generally my favorite kind of nonfiction. Flavor bibles.

SIGHT

Book: Flavor: The Science of Our Most Neglected Sense by Bob Holmes
Release Date: April 25, 2017
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company

A Harvard researcher investigates the human eye in this insightful account of what vision reveals about intelligence, learning, and the greatest mysteries of neuroscience.

Spotting a face in a crowd is so easy, you take it for granted. But how you do it is one of science's great mysteries. And vision is involved with so much of everything your brain does. Explaining how it works reveals more than just how you see. In We Know It When We See It, Harvard neuroscientist Richard Masland tackles vital questions about how the brain processes information -- how it perceives, learns, and remembers—through a careful study of the inner life of the eye.

Covering everything from what happens when light hits your retina, to the increasingly sophisticated nerve nets that turn that light into knowledge, to what a computer algorithm must be able to do before it can be called truly "intelligent," We Know It When We See It is a profound yet approachable investigation into how our bodies make sense of the world.

In the spring, I was telling a friend about how I noticed the light glancing off of the lip of a wine glass and he told me he never would have noticed a detail like that. For me, it’s always been an integral part of my life (and my values, which prioritize finding beauty.) Many people know me as being an intensely visual thinker. For another, I’ve been collecting feedback on my Instagram to better tailor myself to clients, and that was a recurring theme: noticing odd beauties.

In Brain & Behavior this year, I learned about how your vision literally funnels your thought process. What you see is what you think about. It sounds simple, but has completely transformed the way that I look at everything. Knowing that it’s influencing my thought process.

I have so many books on vision, art, and design — so those might be deserving of a whole separate post — but I’ll narrow it down and recommend a book about seeing, specifically. To understand the eye.

SOUND

Book: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin
Release Date: September 1, 2007
Publisher: Dutton Books

In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music--its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it--and the human brain.

Taking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin poses that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, he reveals:

- How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way our brains make sense of the world
- Why we are so emotionally attached to the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac, U2, or Dr. Dre
- That practice, rather than talent, is the driving force behind musical expertise
- How those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our head

A Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, This Is Your Brain on Music will attract readers of Oliver Sacks and David Byrne, as it is an unprecedented, eye-opening investigation into an obsession at the heart of human nature.

I adore categorizing my playlists by month. I could hear a song I placed on a playlist in June 2016 and be taken immediately back. Distinguish between January and June based purely on sound. This is one of my favorite topics to write about, and I have a ton to say about it. I’ve written about music a lot. I also think it’s fascinating that sound tends to be others’ favorite sense? Something taps into the universal there.

I’m so much more aware of ambient sounds than I was before. For example, I hadn’t realized that home felt like a specific kind of bird chirping in the mornings. Or that I didn’t sleep well at school until senior year because, in the country, I could finally fall asleep without background noise leaking through the walls. The clicking of keys, right now.

Also, sound can go in so many different directions: ambient noise, silence, music, listening. I love to read about all of it. For now, I’ll start with music.

SENSORY OVERVIEW

Book: A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
Release Date: September 10, 1991
Publisher: Vintage Books

Diane Ackerman's lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth.

I’m also fascinated by the relationship between senses, as I have an absolute obsession with synesthesia, have researched it a ton, and prefer any writing that blends senses together. So it’s an odd well of knowledge. Reading an overview would be helpful—and ya girl loves a good microhistory.