(soft music)
Welcome to "Hadley Presents."
I'm your host, Ricky Enger, inviting you to sit back, relax,
and enjoy a conversation with the experts.
In this episode,
New York Times bestselling author, Gretchen Rubin, joins us
to discuss bringing attention to our senses
in order to deepen our experience of the world.
Welcome to the show, Gretchen.
Fantastic to have you.
Thank you.
I'm so happy to be talking to you today.
I am really excited.
You are a writer, you're a podcaster,
and you've actually been an answer
on the "Jeopardy!" game show,
which to me is like the highest accolade ever.
Oh, me too.
Believe me, that was quite a day when that happened.
So, before we get into talking about the subject
that you're writing about lately,
why don't you just give us a brief intro,
kind of an overview about the kinds of things
that you like to write and speak about?
Yes.
For more than a decade, I've been writing and researching,
and, as you say, podcasting on my podcast,
"Happier with Gretchen Rubin",
engaging with people really about the subject of happiness
and human nature.
So I'm interested in why do we do what we do?
How can we change if we want to change?
Why do we frustrate ourselves sometimes,
or puzzle ourselves?
Or why do other people frustrate us or puzzle us?
So I'm always trying to understand a human nature
and really how we can have as much happiness as we can,
given our circumstances and our nature.
I started with my book, "The Happiness Project",
and the subject is so fascinating that I've just gone deeper
and deeper and deeper ever since.
What led you then to start thinking about
the senses,
which is I understand you're kind of really into that lately
and you're writing a book about that.
So how did you come on that and decide to do that?
I was having an experience,
and I think it's not uncommon of having a feeling
of sort of being both absent-minded and absent-bodied.
I would go through an experience
and feel like I hardly remembered what happened.
You know, I would eat food without remembering it.
I was like hyperstimulated
with everything being very, very intense
and processed and heightened,
but at the same time, kinda feeling thin.
And this, I became interested in the five senses
before the pandemic period,
but, of course, that also kind of shined a spotlight
on things in ways that I hadn't predicted.
Like the way I have always been very like a huge fan
of the sense of smell.
Like I love the sense of smell,
but for many people they sort of took it for granted.
And oh, boy, when that became a symptom of COVID,
people realized, I talked to so many people
who had fortunately temporarily lost their senses of smell
and like how that changed their understanding
of their environment.
So I became very interested in how to turn
to the five senses for a greater sense of vitality,
of appreciation for the ordinary moment,
and also to engage with other people,
because we often do engage
with other people through our five senses.
In fact, that was one thing that surprised me.
I hadn't real...
I mean, you know, like, oh, yeah,
we all get together for a meal,
but I hadn't realized what an opportunity there is
to think about, well, how could I take a particular sense
and organize an experience around it
that would help me draw closer to others
For our audience
and it's primarily people who are losing their vision
or who have lost vision,
one thing that happens a lot when somebody hears,
oh, you're losing your vision or you lost your vision,
there's this immediate sense of everything
is so much better now for your other senses.
Like you could hear a rabbit breathing
from six miles away or whatever.
And it's almost this expectation
that the other senses become super human.
And I'm just curious, has there been research
or like any hypotheses about what really does happen?
Well, it seems to be very much the case
that the brain does start to rewire
and it will start to use parts of the brain differently.
If one sense is not processing information
and that sort of brain power isn't needed,
it will use that, the circuitry will start to change
to try to make use of that kinda that resource.
But this idea that you get super human abilities, you know,
like the rabbit breathing six miles away.
Now, that doesn't happen.
But it is very true that people start to focus on it more
and to recruit those senses
maybe in a way that others do not need to.
So for instance, people who have vision loss
may become more aware of how sound bounces off of surfaces
in order to help them be aware
that maybe there's something blocking their path.
This is something that cited people could perhaps do,
but they don't draw upon that ability.
Yeah, and I think that's an
interesting theme, right,
is that we could all do it,
but we don't necessarily pay attention to what we could do.
Absolutely.
And I think you've put your finger right on it.
It's that these capacities are, you know, within our reach,
and I certainly felt this to be the case for myself,
but I sort of didn't bother to try to tap into them
or to try to explore their reaches or to see what I could do
or even to just enjoy them kind of on the ordinary course
of life, because I just was, you know, not paying attention.
So I think you're exactly right
that there's a lot more sensation
that we can experience once we start paying attention
to what our senses could offer us.
So how would somebody go about doing that then?
So if we understand that, okay,
we would experience things so much differently
and maybe so much in a more rich way if we paid attention
to the census, how then do we go about actually doing that?
'Cause I don't know that it comes naturally.
That's a really interesting question.
Of course, that was like sort of central to my book.
And there were a couple things that I found.
One is just turning your attention to it
and really trying to say to yourselves,
I really wanna pay attention to the things that I hear.
And sometimes the one way to do that
is just to sort of stop periodically
and really say, well, what do I hear?
One of the things that's fascinating about the brain
is it's trying to help us by filtering out things
that it thinks that we don't need to know
or don't interest us.
So for instance, I was doing a podcast interview
in my apartment.
I live in New York City.
And all of a sudden, the interviewer said,
"Okay, let's pause for a minute then."
And I said, "Why?"
And she said, "Don't you hear that?"
And I said, "What?"
And then all of a sudden,
I heard that there was a loud siren
going right past my door,
and my brain had just filtered that out.
I didn't need to hear that.
And she said to me, "Oh, if you're in Los Angeles,
people don't hear the helicopters."
Because that's what they don't need to hear.
So part of it is trying to train,
or, you know, what am I hearing right now?
What am I smelling right now?
I'm walking outside of my house, what do I smell?
I smell leaves.
I smell dirt.
You know, did somebody just walk by?
And, you know, I live in New York City,
so I smell cigarette smoke.
Trash day,
I know when it's Wednesday morning 'cause it's trash day.
Another thing that I think is really interesting,
and I'm sort of trying to figure out how idiosyncratic I am,
is for me, I realized I had certain senses
that I was very attuned to.
Like I mentioned
that I've always been very attuned to smell.
I love smell.
I like even bad smells.
I'm very interested in even bad smells.
I care a lot about smells.
But then there were other things
that I didn't pay as much attention to.
I'm not a very hearing focused person.
So there are people who, you know, spend hours and hours
listening to music and they love it.
And that really wasn't me.
And so part of it was trying to bring more attention
to my background senses to try to find ways.
Once I realized that, I thought,
well, what can I do to bring more pleasure
and more attention to my sense of hearing?
And I did get a lot more pleasure and attention
once I started looking for ways to amplify that.
And you think, oh, how do I not know myself, right?
I just hang out with myself all day.
I didn't realize how touch focused I was
until I really started thinking about it.
I began realizing, wow, I really care a lot
about how things feel and I really am curious
and I'm always kind of sneaking out my fingers
to touch things.
When I go to a museum, it's really hard for me
to resist rubbing certain sculptures,
'cause I'm like, oh, I just wanna feel that cool marble.
I just, what does that feel like?
And so I realized that I actually did love the sense
of touch much more
than I even had been consciously aware of.
So I think sometimes by saying to yourself, like,
how can I tap more into the things I love?
And how can I find new ways to tap into things
that I maybe I kind of ignore
or don't pay as much attention to as I could
and see if I could bring those more into the foreground?
I love that.
And especially the point about how we all have senses
that we naturally pay more attention to
just as part of our own personalities or what we're into.
I had never thought either about sitting back
and I know what my senses are,
but do I really pay attention
to how much I do certain things?
Like I was sitting here kind of touching my sweater
just as a matter, of course, and realized,
oh, I'm doing that.
Yes.
Oh, but then I started talking to a friend of mine.
I was like, "Well, how do you feel about silky?"
He hates silky.
How do you feel about being immersed in water?
Doesn't like to be immersed in water.
How does he feel about plushness?
Loves plushy.
He's like a thin robe is no robe at all.
And we like got so into it, you know?
But this is something that you don't think about
to talk about.
I'm not that interested in flavor and taste.
And this is something
that many people like really wanna talk about.
And I mean, sure, I like something that tastes good,
but when I think about people who are like super curious
to go to a new restaurant or love new cuisines
or new recipes or dying to try,
like if they hear about an ingredient they've never tried,
they're really curious.
Or if they see a movie and people are eating food,
they wanna eat it themselves,
or, you know, they read a book and people are talking
about, you know, something that they've never tried.
They really wanna try it.
Yeah, that doesn't really happen to me.
And other people are like, are you kidding?
I thought this was just like a basic part of human nature.
I'm like, no, not so much for me.
So we all use our senses
just as we communicate with each other.
One thing that can happen though
is people are losing their vision.
Let's say, they're really accustomed
to looking at the facial expressions
or these really subtle bits of body language,
and suddenly those things are gone.
They can feel like, oh, I am missing so many social cues.
You know, that can be overwhelming
and kind of nerve wracking.
But, I guess, we don't just communicate non-verbally, right?
So what are some other things
that people can pay attention to
to feel those connections still,
even without the facial expressions and body language?
Well, that's true.
That is a big loss
because the face is kind of a user interface
and we do gaze into people's faces
to try to like even things like what are they looking at?
You know, a lot of times
if you know what someone's looking at
that tells you what they're interested in,
it can kind of give you an insight into their thoughts.
And so, of course, it is a real challenge
not to have those cues available to you.
Now, fortunately, people's voices also contain a huge amount
of information, much more often than we're aware of.
Like even with strangers or even with just a few words,
we can get really good insight into someone,
whether someone's sick, whether they're drunk,
how educated they are.
You know, sometimes with regional accents,
you can tell where they're coming from.
There's a lot of information that can come from that.
And also just with intonation, you know,
how quickly people are speaking,
how dramatically they're speaking.
My mother was saying when she was watching TV
and it was a foreign television show,
and so she couldn't understand what they were saying,
so she had the subtitles on.
But she said that the funny thing was
is that she had to adjust the volume
just as if she were listening to their voices,
because she said like,
if she couldn't hear what they were saying,
just knowing the words that they were saying
didn't give her any insight
into what was actually happening.
So if you read a book, it's sort of like he whispered,
she said angrily, like, you have all these cues.
But if you just see the words on the page,
even if you see the people's faces
and their body movements, are they laughing?
Are they joking?
Are they angry?
Is there tension?
You really don't know unless you hear their voices.
Even if that information,
the language doesn't have meaning to you,
the human connection part of it, you can tap into.
And so hearing what people are saying
does convey a lot of information
that can help you make sense of their thoughts
and their intentions and give a lot of clues
even beyond the content of what their actual words hold.
One thing I've noticed you and I have in common
is that we're both smell oriented and-
Oh, good, you're smell oriented too.
Okay.
Yes, very much so.
Like, I was thinking about this,
I read one of your blog posts and I was like,
oh, that is so true.
You know, I could walk into a room
and smell like Ralph Lauren Polo and go,
oh, it smells like 1990, and suddenly be transported back
into this period of my life.
Can you talk a little about,
and maybe it's not just smell, maybe other senses too,
how are they responsible for triggering memory?
Well, this is one of the most
fascinating aspects
of the senses is how they do tie us to the people,
the places and the times that we love.
And claims are often made for smell
that smells the most intense or creates the most emotion.
And I have to say that I'm a little dubious of that.
Like not that I would diminish smell,
which I think is very powerful in invoking memories,
but I think that the other senses also can invoke memories.
So like if I said, if I smelled my kindergarten classroom
or I ate what I ate for lunch in kindergarten,
I think they would both invoke a lot of memories for me.
I think all the senses have this power to evoke memories.
And it is really fun to kind of systematically ask yourself,
you know, how you can tap into memories,
sensory memories to conjure up a lost time.
So for instance, one thing that I did
is I did a taste timeline.
So I went back to my childhood, my daughter's childhood,
my college days, law school,
my first years of being married, and then kind of today,
and thought about, well,
what were the kind of typical things that I ate then,
you know, that were sort of that period?
And it was like when I was in law school,
I drank Diet Peach Snapple all the time,
'cause my law school cafeteria
didn't have any sort of standard soft drinks.
So that was my favorite.
And boy, I went out and bought myself a bottle
of Diet Peach Snapple, and it came back to me with a rush,
just like that law school feeling.
Or I called my sister,
and this is how we can use census to engage our memories
and then also to engage with other people.
I called my sister
'cause, of course, she goes back almost the whole way
with me and I said, "What did we eat as kids?
Do you remember?"
And she's like, "Yeah, yeah.
I remember how we used
to always eat that like Colby Longhorn cheese
that came in the wax?"
I was like, "Oh, yeah."
Or like, "We'd always get Cheez-Its on our..."
We would go visit our grandparents
in North Platte, Nebraska.
And she said, "Remember how we always get Cheez-Its
for the car?"
I was like, "Oh, I forgot about the Cheez-Its
on the car rides."
I think you can try to paint a sense portrait of somebody.
Like think about, well,
like you and I both love the sense of touch,
what senses of touch.
Like with my husband, his hair is kind of very bristly
on the top of his head, or the feeling of his back,
you know, when he's asleep at night.
You know, like paint a portrait of someone,
what smells do you associate with somebody?
I mean, their own smell,
but then also like the smell of their shampoo
or their toothpaste or their laundry detergent
or, you know, your dog smell.
You know, they have all kinds of smells.
Some good, some not so good.
So I think we really can use the five senses
as a way to access memories
that maybe we've forgotten that we remembered.
You know, a lot of times there's a lot more there.
We just don't go hunting for it in our memory banks.
That's fascinating.
And it maybe in part explains why people are so nostalgic
about snacks or foods that are gone.
Oh
Yeah, well, there's this thing I saw where you can order,
it's like nostalgic candy,
and you can order like 1950s candy, 1960s candy,
1970s candy.
And you just see the labels.
And so I was just looking up Cherry Mash.
A friend of mine was saying how he liked Cherry Mash,
was very old-fashioned candy.
And just seeing a picture of it,
I mean, I wasn't even tasting it,
I was just seeing a picture of the packaging
and I was like filled with nostalgia
for being in the grocery store when I was little
and seeing it, you know, in the aisle.
I think people do feel very nostalgic for the things
that they ate at different times of their lives,
or tasted or smelled or heard or thought.
I mean, music.
Think about the music of the music you listen to, you know,
as a kid in the car, you know,
or that your parents listened to.
My father loved listening
to the Mamas and the Papas and the Beach Boys.
Whenever I hear that music, I'm taken back to my childhood
just the way certain kinds of music takes me back
to college.
Or children's music takes me back
to when my kids were really little
and I was, you know, listening to The Wiggles or whatever.
Yeah, I think there's so much
that we don't think about consciously,
but then as we're talking about it, it's this, oh, yeah,
well, of course, it seems like a thing that, well,
why haven't I been paying attention to that before?
And it's not maybe so difficult to then sit back
and think about how can I bring more attention
to what my senses are telling me.
So as we're kind of wrapping up,
you've done a lot of research.
I know your book is not out yet,
so you can't necessarily give spoiler alerts.
What the most surprising thing
that you discovered in your research?
What just kind blew you away,
like, I never thought about that?
Well, just so many facts about the body
for one thing.
I mean, the body is so extraordinary.
Of course, we all know, oh, the body is so amazing.
But I was like, wow, the body is so amazing.
It is extraordinary, the powers of our bodies.
But I think the thing that surprised me most
really was this way that I could tap into the five senses
to really engage with other people,
because when I started this, I really thought about it
as me being my own body, moving through the world
and wanting to engage with the world more deeply.
What I found is that it actually ended up making me engage
with other people more deeply.
I did this thing just the other night with some friends.
I had two couples over, my husband and I,
'cause I had gone to Flavor University
and they would give us samples,
like here, three kinds of chips,
let's taste them and compare them.
We're like, here's skim milk, 2% milk, whole milk and cream,
and oat milk.
Let's compare and contrast.
Everybody had such a fun time,
like we were laughing and talking and reminiscing,
and it brought up a whole different way
for us to engage with each other.
I felt like I got to know people
in a completely different way,
even though these were friends that I'd had for years.
It's just like it got us talking about something
in a very different way.
And it was very fun in low stakes.
It wasn't like, oh,
now, we're gonna play competitive Trivial Pursuit,
or something like this was just like,
what do you think of this potato chip?
And it's like, I think this is a pretty good chip.
And some people will be like, I think this is too salty.
But for some reason, this is fascinating, right?
Or like, I stunned everybody.
I was like, what is this mysterious liquid?
And everybody's like, what is this?
It's Red Bull.
A lot of people had never tried Red Bull,
which, of course, is a hugely popular beverage,
but it was like, so this is what Red Bull tastes like.
I did not know that.
I gave them all a taste of ketchup
'cause ketchup has all five tastes,
sweet, salty, sour, umami, and bitter.
Yeah, it's got a little bit of everything.
And people were like, this is amazing.
Like, there's a reason everybody loves ketchup.
They were like, "It's so complex."
I was just very surprised that something as simple
as sitting around talking about catch up
could be this actually feel like a really meaningful way
to engage with people.
But something that was a little different,
you know, a little bit unexpected, a little bit surprising.
I just had foreseen that at all
when I was looking ahead to writing the book.
I didn't imagine myself doing anything like that.
So it's sort of been interesting that over the course
of the research, I've been more and more drawn
into those kinds of exercises and seeing the value
in that kind of thing in terms of enriching our lives.
That is so cool.
Our senses as just this amazing way
to bring us all together.
I love it.
So as people are listening to this and saying,
where can I learn more about what Gretchen does?
I wanna read all the blog posts, all the books,
and listen to everything.
Where can people go to find out what's going on with you
and what you have done and what you will be doing?
Well, as you mentioned, I have a podcast
called "Happier with Gretchen Rubin",
where every week I talk about, you know, kind of concrete,
manageable ideas about how to be happier, healthier,
more productive, and more creative.
I also have written many books,
which are available in print and in audio.
Almost all my book, I think, except for maybe my first book,
they're all available in audio.
And except for one, I narrated them all myself.
And then I'm online at gretchenrubin.com
and that's sort of a clearing house
for everything that I've got.
I've got a lot of stuff but it's all gathered there.
Excellent.
And we'll have that in our show notes.
And Gretchen, I wanna thank you.
This has been so much fun just chatting about our senses
and really how much more they give to us
than we think about.
Absolutely.
Oh, I so enjoyed talking to you.
Thanks so much.
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