Senses

There have been over 200 times that I’ve heard, “In order to master your life, you must master your senses”. Today, we’re going to take a crack at what exactly is meant by this.

The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.

– Rene Descartes

Humans have been gifted with tremendous abilities. If we were to sit and list them out, the list would easily reach the moon, and probably beyond. Since we don’t happen to have that type of time, we’ll address the most evident ones today. These are the gifts that essentially act as an interface between the externals and the internals, the tangible and the intangible. They are the five senses. To Generation Y and Z, they enable us to process audio, video, olfactory (smell), tastes and touch stimuli.

There have been umpteen studies about the biological significance of and frameworks that guide the human sense system. To illustrate, I’ll put forth a few ways we can gauge how the sense system guides our abilities to focus and pay attention. I just gave the first example, wherein the bold words drew attention towards themselves in a sea of similar looking set of words. Another exemplification, which illustrates the strongest sense among the five, is that the olfactory sense has the ability to create visual images (in our brains) when we smell a fragrance or stench that we bind with an experience in the past. Yet another one is, it has been recorded how evolution has made women more susceptible to sharp noises like that of a crying baby.

Now that we’ve established the concrete layout, we’ll go on to yet another facet that can be linked to the foundation that we’ve set. One of the most important functions of the human sense system, as I mentioned earlier, is to guide our abilities to focus and pay attention. However, what I want to draw attention to (pun intended) right now, is that our attention is not driven just by these five senses anymore. We have more senses, even after we take into account the famous “sixth sense”, which is intuition (We would have to have another discussion on this one, since this in itself will take one, or even more articles to simplify).

The world today has become an extremely complex place to live in, which isn’t a bad thing in itself. Complexity is something that has been on the driving seat for almost all the innovations that have taken place over the past decade. In order to curb the extent of complexity the world has, we have scratched and clawed to find or invent any and every thing that would make our lives just a little bit easier. However, just to play the devil’s advocate here, let me try to elucidate a phenomenon that is widespread in the “simplified” world today.

There have been recent developments in the medical space just in tandem with the technological space. All the technology, which is created with the intention of making our lives easier, does that and much more. Four years ago, a new clinical term came out for “smart phone addiction” called nomophobia (no mobile phone phobia), which results in panic and anxiety anytime people are away from their smart phones. If that’s not enough to create a sense of paranoia, another term coined is “cell phone vibration syndrome” which essentially simulates phone ringing, even when it’s not.

In no way do I intend to question the importance or relevance of technology in our daily lives. As a matter of fact, even to access this article we need technology. However, what concerns me is that the room for simplicity in our lives is shrinking every single day. In earlier times, we were supposed to concern ourselves with only five sorts of stimuli, but now, we create stimuli for ourselves, even when they are not there. Let me illustrate again. How many times do we find ourselves lost in thought, doing absolutely nothing? And this is not the good kind of lost. It’s the kind of lost where we aren’t even able to recall the last thought we had before being shaken up by someone who is so much in awe of a latest meme that he couldn’t wait to show it to us.

Let me try that again. When I have conversations with my friends these days, the response to the general question, the conversation opener, “What are you doing?” comes out to be “Nothing” almost all the time. But does that “Nothing” actually mean nothing? As per my observation, the answer is no more times than it is yes. The “nothing” generally is a replacement for a longer answer, like “scrolling through my social media feed”, “texting someone else while talking to you” or “watching <fill in the latest buzz creating TV show here>” . Now the interesting part, we have actually stopped considering activities to be activities! They are ingrained into our schedules to an alarming extent, so much so, that as soon as we wake up in the morning, even before opening our eyes, we use our ability to sense touch based stimuli to find our phones by rapidly running our hands through the rubble of pillows on our beds!

The point I’m trying to make is, we have lost the ability to anchor our attention, our focus these days, for part of which our senses are also responsible. The moment all (or the dominant ones) of our senses are satisfied, we don’t care about where our attention goes. This, I believe, is where Rene Descartes was coming from. Our senses do have the capability to fool us, and since they guide us, we might be approaching a world where we are no longer aware of the detriments that we might have to face for living on autopilot, for no longer controlling our attentions ourselves.

Therefore, if we are able to master the processing units, the sense system, we might be able to take more rational, better and efficient decision, leading to rational, better and efficient lives.

– Vibhu Vyas