Hello and happy new year. I hope everything goes well for you and yours. Welcome to Vertientes y Tangentes 2024. This year I hope to be able to offer you more interesting, interactive, delicious, creative, and educational content. I'll be delving into the dark side of fitness and wellness (the positive and the negative), the history and anthropology of food, culinary storytelling, unconventional learning, and doing more podcast episodes. Remember to leave your comments, like, share and subscribe.
Among the slopes and tangents that I will be covering this year I will be writing about the human senses, and while I can do research on my own, it would be cool to have your personal input on the matter as well. I think that each one of us has a unique experience about our individual senses, which has led to an individual perception of the world. There are all sorts of weird angles about the topic, and I’d like to explore them. So, here is how you can help:
Consult the following questions, and if you wish, leave your answers in the comments after reading the post.
Do you think you are in total control of your senses?
Which of your senses are you most aware of?
Which of your senses you’d like to improve?
What is your favorite sense and why?
What is your most vivid sensorial memory?
Look at the pictures in the post for at least 10 seconds each. Observe the detail, the emotions and the senses involved.
Leave your thoughts, opinions, or expressions that the questions, the pictures, and the post itself inspire in you.
Speaking about the senses
I have always been fascinated by our sensorial capacity, and no matter how much I read or talk about it, I still find it mysterious and worthy of exploring. I have already made a podcast series talking about our senses 1,2,3 and another episode (in Spanish) exploring the connection between taste and personality4. I am planning to revisit and expand said content, with a series of writings about our sensorial fitness, and how socioenvironmental conditions influence how we sense and perceive things like health, weight, and strength for example.
When I covered this topic in the past, I focused on some of the main senses. However, there are theories (scientific and cultural) about how our senses expand beyond the five main ways we perceive the world and our bodies. I am curious to see what I can find down this slope.
I also want to find out more about the uniqueness of our senses, and what makes them special. Often, when I read or hear about the sensorial differences between the rest of the animals in the world and us, there is this assumption that other species use their senses better than us; and I disagree. Each species experiences the world in their own way through their individual senses. You can’t compare a dog’s sense of smell with ours, just like you can’t compare the sight of an eagle with that of an owl. No one species does it better.
Furthermore, within each species, every family senses the world differently, depending on their environment and social conditions. One way to survive in any environment -even as individuals- is for every species to adapt to change; sensorially speaking.
Going down this slope, I want to explore the issue of animal movement fitness practices and ideas about following nutritional advice based on how other species eat.
Another slope I want to investigate is the connection between our senses and our memories. About remembering sensorial experiences we’ve had in the past (the intensity, the taste, the smell, the weight) and their impact in our lives.
Do you remember the sensations of your first kiss? Or the pungent smell of the worst food you’ve ever brought your nose to? I bet you remember them perfectly in your head, but do you remember physically?
No matter the sense, there are always moments and experiences that when we remember them, our bodies react. We make serious decisions about what kind of partners we want, what foods we prefer, how we decorate our homes, and what kind of workout program we like, based on physical memories.
I will be exploring this topic from many angles, to find their limits, intersections, and uniqueness.
Touch for example is not something that we do only with our hands. What about touching with our feet, or our tongues? While being the same sensorial activity, in the sense that it is just touching, a different kind of stimulus is elicited when we do it with our hands, than when we do it without feet, or when we eat.
Along the way, I also want to find practices to maintain or improve our sensorial fitness that require no memberships, apps, little or no financial investment, and that could be done intuitively.
What do you think of this idea? As you see, this project is taking many directions, and to be honest it is still in the ideation phase. However, this is the perfect moment to ask for your collaboration. The idea is to create a cooperative series in which your comments and thoughts will be part of the research, the content, and can influence the angles with which I approach the topic throughout the year. Anybody can participate. So, sensorially speaking, what’s your angle?
You can be as philosophically deep, or as factually accurate as you want. Take the concept of the senses and look at it from the perspective of what you are -professionally, intellectually, or recreationally- into. Be it cooking, dancing, sex, sports, fitness, education, anthropology, spirituality, poetry, singing, writing, politics, art, etc. Get creative. How would you talk/express about our senses?
Another way in which you can collaborate with me on this project is that if you happen to run into an article, a fascinating podcast interview, an essay, or a documentary that in some way resembles anything to the ideas I have mentioned in this post, send them my way to juanbaez@substack.com. and I will appreciate it. I will be publishing the first post of this series in March 2024.
Do you think you are in total control of your senses?
-- Of course not. Can I choose not to hear the dog barking, feel the cold draft, smell the smoke? Perhaps I AM my senses, and can choose to focus or not, but I cannot silence them.
Which of your senses are you most aware of?
-- The ones that are activated at any given moment. If I stub my toe, that's what I'm most aware of. If there's pizza in the oven....
Which of your senses you’d like to improve?
-- I'd like to have a larger smell vocabulary. I'll often smell something that is familiar, but I have no idea what it is: cloves? cardamom? pepper? A wine tasting course would be fun.
What is your favorite sense and why?
-- That's like asking a mother which is her favorite child. Impossible question.
What is your most vivid sensorial memory?
-- Lying in the grass under a tree, looking up at the branches and the sky, hearing the bees buzzing and the breeze ruffling the leaves above me.
My most vivid sensorial memory of course is when i smell the aroma of la Chimba di Ciali it take me back to the times when my grandfather was alive making vegetable carbon.