While researching Cork Dork, Bianca Bosker discovered a subculture of people who live for taste. And by immersing herself in their world, she went from a life of sensory deprivation to one of sensory cultivation, developing her own senses well beyond previous limitations. In the process, she realized most of us settle for “secondhand sensing”—letting price, labels, and other information substitute for our own experience.
Today, neuroscience reveals that not only can we all train our senses, but also why we should bother to do so: when we attune ourselves to flavor, we engage our more critical, analytical, and higher-order parts of our brain. We’ve all heard of mindfulness. But Bosker came to embrace what she calls “sensefulness”—the idea that it is by tuning into our senses that we truly learn to make sense of the world.
In this talk, Bosker examines what we can learn by cultivating and stimulating the senses—in business and in life, as companies and as individuals. A return to physicality, through a mindset that caters to all five senses, can create analog competitive advantages in how we create products, design experiences, and behave as humans and employees. We tend to focus narrowly on the things we can hear and see. But appealing to touch, smell, and taste provides a means to persuade, charm, solidify messages, and excel. Smell, for example, is an overlooked vehicle for communication—we subconsciously exchange social cues through odors, such that we can “smell” illness, old age, relatives, even women’s tears (the scent of which alters men’s moods). Colors can alter our perception of a food’s flavor; smells can solidify memories.
Sensefulness provides a tool and discipline to tap into our emotions more directly, completely, and effectively, while creating powerful experiences that make us better people, and bring others to our cause. At the same time, tuning into our own senses allows us to stay true to our own felt experience—and avoid being manipulated by noise.