https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/1074598/episodes/16094395-dr-norman-farb-wants-you-to-test-drive-your-senses-by-sense-foraging
This is Verla Fortier of your Outside Mindset show. This podcast is about taking back your outside mindset by exploring and practicing new ways of noticing when you are outside close to nature whether you live in the city or country.
For more on how to reap the mindbody benefits of your time in green space please check out my books on Amazon: 1) Take Back Your Outside Mindset: Live Longer, Stress Less, and Control Your Chronic Illness and 2) Optimize Your Heart Rate: Balance Your Mind and Body With Green Space.
Two podcast episodes ago I did a solo podcast on a great book “Better In Every Sense: How the New Science of Sensation Can Help You Reclaim Your Life.” This is the link to that podcast episode is titled Get Intentional About Using Your Senses.
Today I have the author of this book with me. This is his bio.
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.
2:19 Please share with us a little more about you and why you wrote Better in Every Sense
I came to academia curious about why some people seem to move through life gracefully and seem to have trained their minds.
3:28 I got interested in how the mind works and brain imaging re meditation and mindfulness and saw that these helped people to expand the type of information they included as relevant to themselves – including momentary sensory changes. The self became larger, but less selfish – a paradox.
4:17 This knowledge is acknowledged by by other scientists but not trickling down to the average person. What do we do about this knowledge translation and insights about how the brain can change.
Please explain why trying harder doesn’t work
Trying harder means I am going to double down on the knowledge I already have for how to deal with the problem. This presupposes we know what the problem is and even what the solution is. Our minds might not be open.
Please talk about the networks in the brain
9:08 The brain’s default mode network or DMN balances our heart rate, breathing, and grew to carry our mental habits – like thinking about what I doing this day and the next – the world as we expect it to be.
10:28 Another brain network is the salience network triggered by the sensory network. What we see, hear, taste, touch have dedicated real estate that takes up most of the back of the brain. When new sensory information comes in it can trigger the salience network and move that forward into our brain. Se we see somethinging and we are sensing.
11:43 A way to change our model of the world is that we let our thoughts be interrupted by sensory information. Can ask ourselves what is our habit to respond to those interruptions? Do we try to get rid of them or do we respond to them and treat them as something import to update our models of the world.
How can people do this?
Have fun, experience sacred or the spiritual with sensory practices. 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. Same give yourself 20 seconds for taste and sound. Notice something on the inside of your body after that. Play this 10 second game. It is always available, it is just not our habit to move into it.
These might become magic moments when we move our minds in directions that we are not used to moving them.
Especially when you are feeling overwhelmed make a game of moving into sensation for balance.
This is a great game to play with kids..
I Spy With My Little Eye that is already a part of our culture might have unexpected value. Sometimes we might wish we had a superpower. We do have a super power and that is our attention – what goes into our awareness matters and we can still select what that is (in spite of social media).
Please say more about attention and noticing
We abdicate that power into habit. If we pay attention to the visual – parts of the brain light up. We can actually control what part of the neural apparatus that we activate.
We have alot of power over what shows up in our lives in each moment – if we are intentional – rather than be drawn along by our habits that we already have. Or we can chose to activate the salience4 network by noticing the world around us and that lays tracks for out attention.
We can have stewardship over what our lives are like – other wise other people will control – so that our sense of well-being will be dictated by someone else deciding what we should pay attention to.
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 we experience agency in the world is when we decide what we are going to bring into our field of representation.
How does this change our brain?
When we do this we are leaving trails – leaving footprints like a bridge extended – when we are mindful, attending to our 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.
The dark side is that if you think of this diagnosis, this failed relationship, this layoff, it will pop up automatically.
If we 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,. So that without introspection we think this is the way the world is – this is the way I am – this is the way I am supposed to respond.
You see this in brain imaging right?
Yes functional MRI shows the amount of oxygen in parts of the brain. If you are looking at a sad film we can see what parts of the brain use up more oxygen and what parts do not.
What is sense foraging?
It is this practice of paying attention with the attitude of being curious and open to learning something new. The world is much more vast than we can possibly imagine, always changing – so can we move our attention into our senses with a willingness to be surprised… Noticing sets down new tracks in our brains. This can be profound. Is there a way I can become proficient about moving into a mode of experience where I am opening myself up and updating my models of the world….
Notice beauty, comfort, how parts of your body feel right now. do I feel connected or is my mind disconnected…
You can notice through your noses right now – so that ou are committing to yourself, willing to let yourself be changed and surprised – instead of confirming your expectations.
We see in our studies that people can see themselves not just as stories but as updated tapestries from the body and the world around them. Move from calcification of one confirmed narrative to moments where we can see ourselves just one intentional move away from moments of discontent, suffering – where we wonder how we got stuck in this place. That recognition – to open self up to change – the concrete way to open self up to change is to get sensory. The main way to get to change is through sensory experience – it is not just having an idea (which can be a motivation to try) but real change comes through the senses… to experience something that you did not expect. So these types of experiences – though messy gives you the chance to realize something different about yourself and your world around you
Let’s talk examples
Look for change and movement – lighter, darker, shadow, sunlight, feeling of clothes walking and sitting – baggy tight. Sounds inside your body. Notice the space between one sound and another – when does a sound arrive, when does it leave… the scent of something – is it intense or subtle, does it arrive quickly and when does it leave, what are the strongest qualities, does it trigger memories. Taste is intense or subtle, does it register surprise, does it come and go…. after all that how do you feel?
The senses have a story to tell. Even looking at a cup.. anything we sense is really many little things. This can be destabilizing but there is a freedom here. So many things put the world together and it’s much richer than we thought. What is that space from which things emerge and it becomes almost metaphysical.
Knowing this s available you can move into it easily. With practice it becomes much easier – a super power that can enrich your life.
Let’s talk the tired or wired approach re taking a your little one to the park
With a young child there is a crippling amount of fatigue when you are responsible for early life experiences and going to the park takes care of lots of things. Kids can explore and play. It is a chance for parents to be drawn in or wired into doing this together.
If I am tired I am on my phone, might be oblivious and locked into a narrative that if I am tired I have to conserve my resources and deal with emergencies only. So I am not being here for me.
Try to distinguish between the opportunity to sense forage or just go through the motions.
At the end of the day if you are not engaged in sense foraging – really letting things in, being willing to be surprised, leaning in, then nothing will change for you. It will just be another day to get through. Instead of a flash of play.
40:25 Access points?
Find your own way into sense foraging is easier and more fun. Everyone doesn’t have to do the same. Sensory engagement and exploration can be fun if you find the right way in. Keep trying. For example, the biggest predictor of people who quit smoking is the number of times they try to quit.
So you are being dogmatic about trying to find an access point while also knowing that you don’t know what that will look like — is the key to developing a successful sense foraging practice habit.
Access points for sense foraging might be the clack of knitting needles. Find the thing that lights you up and draws you in. And then know that you are on to something – you are not just sense foraging because you were told it is a good thing to do.
The first access point you talk about is nature ( and I know my global nature nurses will be very interested in this)
Yes the kids say “touch grass.” the external environment provides a scaffolding place – the beauty in nature draws us out of our mental habits – there is something that attracts us to it – find the right level of nature for you – and emerge yourself in it,. This intrinsically connects you to your senses. As you know people who spent time in nature have replicable health benefits. They feel better about themselves. The rewards are palpable.
In your book you say “novices sense and experts toggle” what do you mean by that?
I think it was meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein who says “after the ecstasy the laundry” The initial romance stage of sensing is amazing, but at some point you have to pick what you believe in, pick the habits you want to form. Pick the values you want to express to the world.
This means setting up your models again. if you want to be more patient and kind, you have to cultivate this by toggling away from the sensory. So you set an intention by exploring what it would look like (visualize) of you to be patient and kind. Ask what else is available in this situation (eg your senses)?
We can talk about the conceptual models of life, we can have periods of exploration and sense foraging – and ask ok is there any meaning here, what is the expectation around the world, what are my goals. These are conceptual things.
The (rarified) balance between chaos and uncertainty and the conceptual world. We can move between these modes.
Tell us about the split wine and the dinner party example
I am a guest who spills wine on the dinner guest of honour by accident. Instead of worrying the whole evening about repairing my social standing by talking about it alot and apologizing constantly (when it is clear everyone has moved on and wants to enjoy their dinner) , I move into a period of sensory engagement, then help clean it up and ask that the dry cleaning bill be sent to you.
52:40 When in the sensing moment might label your feelings as embarrassed. Stay open to hearing this, stay receptive, once I label, I free my mind to think of other things- otherwise the emotion will keep demanding my attention.
Neuroimaging suggests that when you label the information (in this case emotions) the alarm centres of the brain settle down. But if you ignore and focus on other things while something is going on (emotionally) the alarm bell keeps ringing. Spend a bit of time acknowledging what is happening, is ironically better than letting the alarm bell of emotion to keep ringing. So pay attention to the emotion in order to turn off the alarm.
Where can listeners find more of your work p[ease?
Betterineverysense.com is our website.
Last words to our listeners?
For our purposes the real way to learn to give yourself concrete practices is noticing something new for 2 minutes – then check back with yourself – how do you feel? Do you feel any different? You can read, listen to podcasts but the real action is in the sense foraging.
So listeners pick up a copy of Better in Every Sense. And as authors Farb and Segal say “sense before you leap.” Get to know your senses, enjoy the pause and the relief that this provides – especially if you feel stuck. Then toggle back to your problems for new insights because we all need a little more of your outside mindset.
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