4
The Senses, the Body, and “Big Blue”
It is only through the senses that we experience what it means to be fully human.
—LAURA SEWALL, SIGHT AND SENSIBILITY
As we’ve seen, previous experiences shape the way our brain reacts to the world. But it’s more complicated than that, and to better understand the power of Blue Mind, we need to look more deeply at how the brain takes in information and transforms it into predilection or revulsion.
Scientists believe a baby’s senses begin to develop as early as eight weeks after conception. By twenty-six weeks, all five of the “traditional” senses—touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight—are present and functioning even in the womb.1 But after birth our senses start to engage with the wider world, and we are quickly awash in a sea of perceptions, with the brain as the processor that turns a sensation into a perceptive experience. It accomplishes this remarkable feat in several different ways. First, the brain breaks down this onslaught of sensory information into more manageable “bytes.” A byte is a unit of digital information consisting of eight bits, each bit designated by a 0 or a 1. Comparisons made between the human brain and computers are problematic in many ways—your brain is so very much more complex than a computer, at least in the way computers most people know, use, and love today function—but do raise the question: what is the storage capacity of the average brain? Estimates vary considerably, ranging from as low as 1 terabyte (10,000,000,000,000 bits) to around 2.5 petabytes, 1 petabyte being around 1,000 terabytes.2 Regardless of capacity, there are limits to how much and how fast we can take up information; David Poeppel describes the brain as having a “sampling rate” (he’s speaking about visual and auditory stimuli, but the principle holds for any kind of perception). “The world comes at you, visually or auditorily or through your other senses, and the brain’s solution is to break the information down into small packets, which it takes in at particular rates of time,” he explains. “The job of the brain is to put all of those ‘packets’ of information on top of each other, integrate them on the fly, and make them congruent.” The body’s systems for transmitting data from the senses to the brain also limit the amount of information coming in at any given time. Even though upwards of 10,000,000,000 bits of visual stimuli hit the retina every second, due to the limited number of outputs from the eye into the optic nerve only 6,000,000 of these bits can be transmitted from the retina through the optic nerve, and only around 10,000 bits arrive at the visual cortex. Of those 10,000 bits, around 100 are actually used for our conscious perception of what we are seeing.3 Yet here the brain’s fantastic strength as a pattern recognizer allows it to fill in missing information that your senses can’t perceive; for example, you never notice the “blind spots” in your field of vision in both your left and right eye because your brain automatically fills in the necessary visual data.
Second, the brain separates the “signal” from the “noise,” so to speak: there’s a specific location in the brain called the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), at the intersection of the occipital (vision), temporal (hearing), and parietal (touch) lobes, that’s designed to receive, process, and integrate sensory data in such a way that the world makes sense. At any given moment you may be seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling a huge number of things, but your cognitive mind uses only the stimuli needed to turn that information into a cogent, multisensory experience.4 At the same time, too much paring down is a cognitive malfunction of the highest order. If we try to isolate the input from our different senses, we lose much of our ability to find meaning in the world.5
Third, the brain uses past experiences to build perceptual “maps” (neural signatures, especially corresponding to dynamic sensory inputs as opposed to our hardwired static networks, are often described in cartographic terms), and then uses those maps it has created to make sense of new perceptions.6 We have maps that allow us to discern shapes and see colors, pick out the voice of a loved one, smell whether milk has gone sour, or determine whether the temperature of our bathwater is just right. In fact, we may well base our own version of the “real world” not solely on what we perceive but instead by matching what we perceive with what we think we should perceive. “Perception is based on recognition and interpretation of sensory stimuli,” writes neurologist Gerald Smallberg. “From this data, the brain creates analogues and models that simulate tangible, concrete objects in the real world. Experience… colors and influences all of our perceptions by anticipating and predicting everything we encounter and meet.”7
If we don’t have perceptual maps for a particular set of stimuli, the brain has a great deal of difficulty making sense of what it perceives. Studies of individuals who were either blind from birth or lost their sight very young and then had it restored years later show that while they immediately could discern light and color,8 the previously blind typically had difficulty recognizing shapes, dimension, closeness or distance of objects, or understanding the meaning of facial expressions in others. In this situation our old acquaintance neuroplasticity is both a friend and a foe. If someone has had little or no visual stimulation growing up, usually the other senses (hearing, touch, smell) will “take over” parts of the brain normally devoted to visual processing. When visual stimulation is restored (or a substitution is made), the brain immediately begins laying down neural networks to support vision—but depending on how much time has passed, the spaces usually reserved for vision are now occupied, forcing those new networks to be laid down elsewhere. On the flip side, because of neuroplasticity it is possible for the blind to learn to “see,” sometimes by utilizing some very unconventional methods. David Eagleman describes a device developed by neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita in the 1960s. A video camera was mounted on the forehead of a blind person, and the picture of the environment was translated into small vibrations on the back. After a week, the blind individual was able to “see” the environment through his back. In a more recent case, a rock climber learned to “see” through a grid of 600 electrodes placed on his tongue.9 Humans have even learned how to coarsely echolocate and “see” like marine mammals or bats, by listening carefully to the way clicking sounds they made with their mouths or walking sticks bounce off surrounding objects, buildings, and landscapes. This seems impossible to the rest of us—and it is impossible for us, because our brains are populated with standard systems, with no room for such radical remodeling.
Like the neural networks we lay down and strengthen by what we pay attention to and the actions we take, we build our perceptual maps based on the sensory experiences we pay attention to in the world. That’s why artists and photographers are usually far more precise about color, line, and sharpness of visual images: they have spent years developing perceptual maps for visual distinctions. “Our attentional focus, both internally and externally, influences and creates subjective reality by facilitating the perception of some objects, relations, and events to the exclusion of others,” writes ecopsychology pioneer Laura Sewall. 10 At the same time, it turns out that such exclusion can have surprising, sometimes hazardous, spillover effects. According to Michael Merzenich, “One of the more important findings of recent research is how closely connected our senses (hearing, vision, and so on) are to our memory and cognition. Because of their interdependence, a weakness in one is often related to—or even the cause of—a weakness in the other. For example, we all know that Alzheimer’s patients slowly lose their memories. One way this manifests is that they eat less food. Why? As it turns out, visual deficits are also a part of Alzheimer’s. People eat less because they can’t see the food as well.… Another example is in normal age-related cognitive changes. As we grow older, we get more forgetful and distracted in large part because our brain does not process what we hear, see, and feel as well as it once did. The result is that we can’t store images of our experiences as clearly, and so have trouble using them and recalling them later.”11
But it isn’t just our perceptions of the physical world that shape us, and that are in turn shaped by what we perceive. Our emotional reactions to what we perceive are also encoded in our brain as part of the “formula.” The problem is that we have lost sight of this important fact.
I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
—JOHN BURROUGHS
Imagine yourself walking in the forest along the edges of a stream. The green canopy of leaves overhead rustles slightly, moved by wind or perhaps the passage of a bird or squirrel through branches. The uneven ground beneath your feet makes you pay more attention than usual to the feel of the earth, the roughness of tree roots, the occasional rock that juts upward to trip you if you’re not careful. You smell the slightly fermented odor of damp leaves rotting, and you get an occasional whiff of spray from the water beside you. You notice the roughness of the bark on the trees you’re passing, and the gradations of green of various trees and bushes. Your ears, without the usual electronic and/or urban overstimulation, start to hear the different ways your shoes sound on dirt or on leaves. Unconsciously, you had been aware of the sound of the water in its streambed and a raft of birdcalls, some right overhead, many more in the distance; but as you walk, these sounds come into focus. You stop for a moment and simply enjoy your surroundings. Your senses are doing what they were meant to do: engage fully with the natural world as an integral part of it. “For the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings,” philosopher and cultural ecologist David Abram states. “And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished. Direct sensuous reality… remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.”12
Yet in most of the modern world, our primary perceptions are almost entirely filtered through human construction. We walk on sidewalks or drive on roads in our human-built cars, to places of work that are human-created, “built” environments. We listen to music, watch TV, surf the Internet, read books; eat prepared meals that taste nothing like their original natural ingredients; use perfumes and soaps and household products that mask real smells; and touch screens and plastic and processed materials that feel like nothing in nature. None of this is bad per se, but we have been separated from the very stimuli we were built over hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years to perceive: the richness of the natural world. Neon signs are beautiful, cell phones are useful, subways are efficient, and crowds spilling out into the paved streets have a powerful appeal. But such commotions are the wrong key to a lock installed by evolution—and even those amidst the skyscrapers know it without knowing it. Study after study, as well as personal experience, shows that the overstressed, overstimulated, urbanized mind can find greater relief in the more subtle perceptions of a park, a forest, a beach, or a riverbank than it can from almost any human-produced environment.13 And while visualizing yourself in natural environments is certainly better than nothing, all of our senses are craving the full “nature” experience.
Sight and Water
It is life, I think, to watch the water. A man can learn so many things.
—NICHOLAS SPARKS
According to neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, there are as many as thirty visual areas in the brain devoted to everything from identifying what something is, to where it is in the environment, its relationship to other objects, as well as relationships between features of the object itself. Other associated areas provide a name for the object as well as all the facts and memories associated with it (in other words, creating its meaning), while the amygdala assesses its emotional significance.14
Many studies have been done that show exactly what makes certain visual images stand out. Not surprisingly, these characteristics are tied to what helped us to survive in the natural world and are prominent features of water: color, shininess, and motion. Let’s start with color.
Color
I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.
—STEPHEN KING, FROM “RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION”
In Harpur Hill, near Buxton, Derbyshire, British locals know a quarry pool as the Blue Lagoon. For years it’s attracted dozens of swimmers to its beautiful turquoise water—despite the signs posted at its edges saying things like “Warning! Swimming in this pool can cause skin and eye irritations, stomach problems, fungal infections, and rashes.” The pH level of the quarry pool is close to that of ammonia or bleach, and the water is filled with rubbish and dead animals. Yet it wasn’t until the local government dyed the water in the Blue Lagoon black that swimmers stopped taking the plunge.15
Whether it’s logical or not, humans seem drawn to the color blue. It’s overwhelmingly chosen as their favorite color by people around the world, beating its closest competing color by a factor of three or four.16 Both women and men prefer blue to green, red, or purple.17 And blue is everywhere: while it’s the rarest color in nature (appearing only occasionally in plants or animals), on every sunny day we can look up and be dazzled by the incredible blue of the sky. Water, too, possesses a range of blue tones, mixed in with greens and browns and whites depending on depth and location. And, as the residents of Harpur Hill demonstrate, even toxic blue water can entice us with its sense of cool refreshment.
When marketers and psychologists have asked people what qualities they associate to blue, they use words like “credibility,” “calming,” “clean,” “focused,” “cleanliness,” “openness,” “depth,” and “wisdom.”18 Emotionally, blue is associated with trust, confidence, and dependable strength: is it any wonder that companies such as Facebook, AT&T, Lowe’s, American Express, HP, IBM, Walmart, Pfizer, and Vimeo use blue in their corporate logos? (Blue even predominates on the packaging of black-and-white Oreo cookies.) You can open almost any magazine and see several ads that use beautiful washes of blue to market everything from tropical or ski vacations to the latest offer from Best Buy or Bed Bath & Beyond. Even those who are well aware that the success of their products involves reducing a sense of calm and increasing a sense of urgency go blue; witness the logos of Facebook and Twitter.
Other investigations have confirmed this soothing effect. For example, researchers in Japan reported that people who sat next to a blue partition while playing a video game had a more regular heartbeat and reported that they felt less fatigued and claustrophobic than those who sat next to a red or yellow partition.19 And in a recent “virtual reality” study, subjects who were wearing bands on their wrists that transmitted a sensation of heat were told to signal when the temperature reached a painful level. As they did so, they watched monitors that showed a picture of their arms with the band represented by red, green, or blue. People perceived the greatest pain when the area was colored red, and the least pain when it was colored blue.20
Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?
Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.
—ROBERT FROST, “FRAGMENTARY BLUE”
Light is an electromagnetic wave—not metaphorically but literally—and color is a function of the length of the wave in each packet of light that enters your eye after it reflects and refracts off and through a variety of surfaces and substances, from air and water, to skin, fur, and feathers. Violet is at one end of the visible color spectrum, which ranges from 400 to 700 nanometers (nm), and red at the other, with blue at about 475 nm. Exposure to light of the wavelength corresponding to the color we call blue has been shown to produce physical, cognitive, and emotional benefits. As Amir Vokshoor, a neurosurgeon who specializes in minimally invasive microsurgical treatment of adult spinal and cranial disorders, remarks, “Due to its specific wavelength, the color blue is known to exert a calming, relaxing, yet energizing effect and thus stimulate a positive emotional response. In fact, the arousal mechanism stimulated by blue’s wavelengths correlates to the release of neurotransmitters thought to be associated with feelings of euphoria, joy, reward, and wellness related to the effects of dopamine.” Vokshoor theorizes that the reason blue produces such positive feelings is that humans evolved on a planet that is primarily shades of water and sky blue, alongside shades of green and earth tones.
In a 2010 study, seventeen people listened to voices while they were exposed to alternating periods of blue or green light. According to fMRI scans, blue light enhanced the connectivity between the area of the brain that processes voices and the amygdala and hypothalamus (the body’s primary gateways of emotional processing).21 That is, blue light actually strengthened and further established the crucial neural networks that allow us to hear and understand voices. Color clearly colors our other senses, and vice versa.
It’s far more fun to push past “blue is good” and ask—at the risk of offering up a just-so story—“why would we have evolved for it to be so?” From an evolutionary point of view we can imagine that auditory function being enhanced in response to the color blue could indicate proximity to open sky and water, implying a need to listen more carefully for distant sounds than when in a more closed or confined locale. Or, while we are conjecturing, couldn’t it have been because the “white noise” of waves and current made it harder to hear, versus the quieter savannah?
It isn’t just the colors that we see which have a pronounced effect on how we understand the world—it’s the very means by which we see those colors (and everything else) in the first place. Humans need the full spectrum of light available in nature to be healthy and to regulate our circadian rhythms. Unfortunately, for reasons related to production cost and the ubiquity of cheap energy, most incandescent light sources concentrate on the yellow-orange-red end (similar to firelight) and lack the blue-green end of the light spectrum. Moreover, the modern lifestyle that keeps us up late and gets us up early can limit our exposure to natural light. That’s why exposure to blue-light wavelengths has been shown to readjust circadian rhythms in nighttime workers and lessen the effects of seasonal affective disorder (SAD). The future of lightbulbs lies in full-spectrum, adjustable, and customizable LEDs, which are good for illumination and, thanks to their range of spectrum, good for your brain, too.
The LED point isn’t that flicking a switch instantly lights up your Blue Mind, too. You still need the water. But it further reinforces the neurological potency of that most central color when it comes to waves, currents, pools, and the like.
Of course, as anyone who’s ever had the “blues” can attest, blue has its dark side. It can be associated with coldness, sorrow, even death (perhaps because our lips and faces take on a blue pallor when we are low on energy or oxygen).22 In 1901 Pablo Picasso sank into a profound depression and began what is known as his Blue Period, when he used mostly blue and blue-green hues in his paintings. Muddy Waters describes the blues as “deep, profound, with a primordial groove.” And yet interestingly, when depressed people are asked to describe the color of their emotions, gray is the word more frequently used than blue—and they often still describe blue as their favorite color.23
Indeed, at a fundamental level our brains can’t let go of blue’s powerfully positive qualities. In Japan, suicide is a significant problem and jumping in front of trains a common method. Several years ago the government installed blue lights in high-crime areas as well as railway stations. Crime dropped by 9 percent, but more important, suicide attempts in the blue-lit areas ceased altogether.24
Such a decrease may be due to blue’s calming effects—or perhaps its ability to enhance cognition. According to a 2010 study in Europe, exposure to blue light increased responses to emotional stimulation in both the hypothalamus and the amygdala—areas of the brain that involve attention and memory.25 Recently two researchers in Canada showed that red and blue enhance different kinds of cognition. Red seemed to be helpful for attention to detail, for practicality, and for specifics, whereas blue encouraged greater creativity and attention to relationships between items. “Depending on the nature of the task, different colors might be beneficial,” the researchers commented.26 Possible crime victims and perpetrators alike might behave differently if they were thinking more clearly; likewise potential suicides. Criminals might even contemplate the odds of getting caught and decide to back off.
“The color of young dreams is changing from green to blue.”
—ERIC CHARLESWORTH27
One of my favorite pieces of art glows with blue: the Chagall America Windows at the Art Institute of Chicago. Over the years a hazy gray film accumulated on the glass, but not too long ago the windows were restored and the blue—“Chagall blue,” as it’s called by lovers of his work—is vivid again. The blue illuminates everything it touches, bringing coolness, freshness, and clear light to the space. Whenever I have a chance, I visit the museum. There I stop and gaze at the depth of color ranging across Chagall’s three windows, 8 feet by 32 feet of watery immersion. When I stand in front of them, I think, If anyone doubts the power of blue, try painting the bottom of a swimming pool red!
Motion Without Movement
Today, almost no pool goes in without a water feature. They want to see the water move; they want to hear it move, they want it to dance, to turn colors at night.
LYNN SHERR, SWIM: WHY WE LOVE THE WATER
What is it about the way water moves, reflects, glimmers and glows that mesmerizes and transfixes us? The reflective surface of water draws humans in the same way it drew our ancient ancestors to drinking pools in Africa—after all, the shiniest thing our ancestors probably saw was sunlit water. Today, it seems that our attraction to the sparkle of watery surfaces is part of our DNA. A recent study of children as young as six to seventeen months demonstrated their universal inclination to lick the shiny surface of a stainless steel plate (or the mirrored surface of a toy) while on their hands and knees—“in a manner not unlike the way older children drink from rain pools in developing countries,” stated the researchers. “Such mouthing of glistening surfaces by nursing-age children might characterize the precocious ability to recognize the glossy and sparkling features of water long before this information is useful later in development.”28
“Near water, light takes on a new tonality,” writes French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. “It seems that light has more clarity when it meets clear water.”29 It’s why humans love fountains and waterfalls, why we are transfixed by sunlight sparkling on the surface of ponds, lakes, streams, rivers, and oceans. In the motion of the water we see patterns that never exactly repeat themselves yet have a restful similarity to them. Our eyes are drawn to the combination of novelty and repetition, the necessary criteria for the restfulness of “involuntary attention.” Water becomes something that people can watch for hours and never be bored. Indeed, images of water in motion can even modify a negative response to other environmental stimuli: a 1999 study showed that white noise was considered less annoying when it was accompanied by a picture of a waterfall, suggesting a natural sound source.30
Even more healing, perhaps, is the lack of speed with which the visual stimulus of water’s movement enters our eyes and brain—all the more potent in a world of rapid, digital, flicking visual images in our media; commercials, action sequences in movies and on TV, and video games coming at us at a pace that’s too fast for the brain to comprehend consciously, putting us into a state of hypervigilant overstimulation that all too quickly becomes our status quo.31
But if we stop for just a moment, put our tablets and smartphones down, and just watch the water, we can find a measure of rest and a sense of peace in the dance of drops from a fountain or the lazy motion of the current in a broad river. As reporter Charles Fishman writes in The Big Thirst, a book about the future of water as our most precious resource, “It’s hard to be in a bad mood around beautiful flowing water. Whatever cares you have are lightened when you spend some time with water. The presence of a brisk, bright mountain stream makes you smile, it makes you feel better, whether you’re already feeling good or you’re low.”32 And that ability to sit outside and watch the play of water has benefits beyond contentment. Ophthalmology studies done in Australia theorize that the increasing rate of nearsightedness in children and young people could be due to less time spent in settings where the eyes need to focus on longer distances.33 In an age of computer/smartphone/screen-stressed vision, the homonyms “sea” and “see” take on a significance beyond rhyme.
The Redolence of Water: Smell and Taste
I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent was much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma; it was a whiff of salt and mint, just as I approached the water on a dive, that warned me that a more powerful scent would soon enter my nose.
—ANNE SPOLLEN, THE SHAPE OF WATER
Certainly we don’t want the water we drink to have much of a smell (or taste),34 but if you think of any moment in which you encountered water, chances are you will remember some aroma, even a subtle one. The smell of rain in the air, or the cool mist of droplets from a fountain… the slightly woody scent of leaves mixed with freshness when you come upon a creek or stream… the tang of salt along the ocean or the just-can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-it fresh smell of a lake. All of these scents have natural origins—plant decay, bacteria, dimethyl sulfide (DMS), ozone.35 These bits and pieces of life and death, animal, plant, and mineral, produce a raft of aromatic chemicals that enter the nostrils, triggering chemoreceptors that stimulate the olfactory receptor neurons, which send signals to the brain. Unlike our other senses, however, information about smell bypasses the thalamus and goes straight to the olfactory bulb, a part of the limbic system that includes the amygdala (which, as we’ve discussed, is crucial in both the formation and memory of emotional experiences). This is the reason that smells are some of our most powerful emotional triggers.
Numerous studies have shown that smell may affect our cognition, mood, and health. In a 2011 paper, psychologist Andrew Johnson states, “Essential oils and other commercially available scents have… been shown to positively affect memory, vigilance, pain perception, self-perception/confidence, consumer decision making, and alertness.”36 An earlier study showed that using orange and lavender oils on patients prior to treatment reduced their anxiety and improved their mood.37
Unfortunately, there have been no studies of the effects of more watery scents on humans, but I believe that the strong emotions many of us experience around water can be triggered by even the faintest whiff of salty air or the fragrance of damp earth after rain. Not long ago, I asked master perfumer Libby Patterson to create an ocean scent for me. She did, and calls it Wave. It’s a mix of oils from the coastal vegetation near my home, the smell of kelp, mixed with burnt shell. To me it hints of the way my skin smells in the morning after swimming in the Pacific Ocean all day and sleeping by a fire on a beach all night. I now travel everywhere with a small vial of it in my kit, to remind me instantly of home on the Slow Coast.
But even more indefinable than the smell of water is its taste. Taste and smell are intricately entwined, the one literally “feeding” off the other;38 but where smell hits the brain directly in its limbic system, to taste something the brain must use the senses of taste, smell, touch, texture, and heat (and even, sometimes, pain), processing the information in the gustatory area of the cerebral cortex. Many people have strong likes and dislikes of certain tastes that may have been instilled before birth. (What your mother ate when you were in the womb can have an effect on your preferences.) Some of us prefer sweet tastes, others salt, others bitter, and so on; certain people can’t stand particular textures, or the smell of a food (Brussels sprouts or broccoli) puts them off, or they can’t take even the smallest amount of heat/spice. On the other hand, most people have certain foods that trigger strong emotions. Your mom’s apple pie or baklava, the mac and cheese you had every Thursday night when you were a kid, your grandmother’s dal or kofte or collards or pierogi—even the smallest taste will call up the memories of your childhood.
For many of us, the taste of water is the taste of salt—or even more, the taste of the creatures that make the water their home. Who hasn’t tasted a freshly caught piece of fish, or lifted a succulent mussel, clam, or oyster to their lips, and thought, “This tastes like the sea or lake or river”? And if you’ve ever had the chance to eat that piece of seafood close to the water, you’ll know how much your gustatory enjoyment can be enhanced by the rest of your senses. In 2006 experimental psychologists Charles Spence and Maya U. Shankar conspired with celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal to conduct an experiment to see how surroundings affect taste. At the opening session of a conference in the United Kingdom on art and the senses, guests were served oysters with two different soundtracks in the background: one a “sounds of the sea” complete with seagulls and waves, the other a series of farmyard noises that included chickens clucking. Not surprisingly, the audience rated the oysters consumed to the sounds of the sea as more pleasant.39 After this experiment, Heston created a “Sound of the Sea” tasting menu for his restaurant The Fat Duck, in nearby Bray. The plate resembled a beach, with sand, seaweed, and foam decorating it, and a pair of iPod headphones peeking out of a seashell surrounded by food. When guests put on the headphones, they heard a “sounds of the sea” soundtrack to accompany their meal. See, hear, smell, taste—is it any surprise that the dish became a Fat Duck signature?40
Heston’s meal points out the importance of something we haven’t focused on yet: sound. We’ll get there soon, but first let’s get to another sense: touch.
The “Feel” of Water: Body, Brain, and Your Senses
It appeared as if I had invited the audience into the water with me, and it conveyed the sensation that being in there was absolutely delicious.
—ESTHER WILLIAMS
Stand next to a rushing waterfall and you’ll feel the vibrations in your bones. Drift along on a boat in a calm lake and notice how the gentle motion makes you sleepy. Swim laps in a pool and revel in the fact that your body is light, buoyant, supported completely by the water that surrounds you. Stand in a hot shower at the beginning or end of a day and enjoy the tension draining from your muscles. The body provides a cornucopia of different sensory stimuli to the brain. These sensations anchor us in the world by giving us a clear indication of our physical position in it, and bring us into the present moment when our thoughts wander. Without the senses that reside in the body—touch, pressure, temperature, weight, motion, position, balance, vibration, and pain—we could not interact with our outer environment safely.
Skin, bones, muscles, joints, and organs—all transmit information from their nerve cell receptors through the sensory nerves in the spinal cord, into the thalamus (also the primary nexus for sight and hearing) and then to the different areas of the brain depending on the particular sensory input. Touch is processed in what is known as the somatosensory area, with more neurons dedicated to signals from the sensitive parts of the body, such as the face or hands than, say, the shoulder. Pain, proprioception, and posture are processed in the cerebellum; there are also pathways for the kind of perception that maintains muscle tone and posture without your conscious thought. To understand that, try consciously letting your body sag and go limp all over right now. That’s probably not your typical stance, even when you’re at ease and not paying any particular attention to your posture. Additionally and simultaneously you maintain balance with the vestibular system, which runs from the inner ear canals to the brain stem, and then to the cerebellum and the reticular formation.
As we’ve already seen when discussing neuroplasticity, our bodies are ever-changing within an environmental feedback loop. Thus, our senses help us perceive the outside world, but that outside world can deeply inform our senses themselves, which in turn can stimulate our attention on the outside world. Among the foundational elements,41 water can far and away play the most beneficial role in keeping us “in touch” with the sensory world. It has a tangible quality, a weight, heavier than air yet, unlike earth, we can move through it. Like earth, water supports us and takes our weight; in fact, because the human body has a density similar to water’s, we are buoyed up by it. We feel as if we weigh less in water, which makes it the ideal medium for exercise for those with physical limitations. “The body, immersed, feels amplified, heavier and lighter at the same time. Weightless yet stronger,” writes swimmer Leanne Shapton.42 We couldn’t have survived without fire, but the centrality of water is unquestionable.
Our senses keep us firmly connected with the world around us—yet at the same time, they trap us in what evolutionary biologist Scott Sampson calls “our skin-encapsulated selves” on the online salon Edge.org (in response to the question “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”).43 It’s easy to forget that the body is composed of the same atoms that make up the world that surrounds it, and that we are exchanging molecules with every inhale and exhale, every morsel of food, and every skin cell that sloughs off as a new one appears. By cutting ourselves off from the awareness of our interdependence with everything that is not man-made, we sever ourselves from the incredible beauty of what our senses actually are taking in. Yet when the architectural beauty of the tower, bridge, street, cafe, tunnel, walkway, taste, sound, and smell of the village, town, city, and megalopolis are woven and suffused with blue and green spaces, life can be so very good.
Flotation Tanks: The Brain on Nothing
“Something is happening,” your body says to your brain, with mild urgency. My brain went a little haywire. When the storm passed, I found myself in a new and unfamiliar state of mind.… For the first time in my waking life, I had zero thoughts. It was a mental quietude I’d never known existed.
—SETH STEVENSON
Near water, but especially in water, our bodily senses—touch, pressure, temperature, motion, position, balance, weight, vibration—are truly alive. But there is one place where being in water can feel like nothing at all; where, very deliberately, none of our senses are stimulated, with some very unusual results for the brain. In 2010 sound artist and musician Halsey Burgund and I collaborated on a project called Ocean Voices. We asked people of all ages from all over the world to talk about water, the ocean, and their feelings, and recorded their voices to create a symphony of ideas expressed through the spoken word. Many of them recalled the physical sensations of being in water.
“I could relax and float.”
“I feel weightless.”
“It’s like floating in infinity.”
“I feel the up and down of the water hours and hours after I leave the ocean.”
“I think the ocean feels like a cool mistiness.”
“I feel completely embraced, protected.”
Not long ago I found myself opening a hatch on a white, smooth, and rather modern-looking capsule. If it hadn’t been positioned in the corner of a rather small room, one might have thought it could take off like a quick electric car, ocean submersible, or some sort of flying craft. But it was none of those things. It was a very particular creation designed for a particular sort of quiet: a flotation tank. Inside the tank was warm, salty, 97-degree water—enough salt, 700 pounds, to keep my body afloat effortlessly at the water’s surface. No bed is as comfortable as floating in warm water, but this was really something. The tank was big enough so that my body wouldn’t come in contact with the sides or bottom; sound-insulated enough so that the only thing I’d hear would be the beating of my heart and the rise and fall of my breathing; and warm enough that the water, the air, and my body would feel like a continuum. And dark—as in no light whatsoever.
I took off my clothes, climbed in, closed the hatch, extended my legs and arms, and put my head back. I couldn’t really tell the difference between having my eyes open or closed. I think they were mainly closed. Or open. Who knew? Not me.
The distinction between the water and the air was also unclear. For about thirty minutes, floating in the dark, my brain looped the familiar patterns, schedules, urgencies, absurdities. Then what I can best describe as a dissolving process began. Reference points, images, and ideas began to soften and erode like a tablet in water. My sense of location and time, my plans for the day, month, year, all slowly flaked away into nothingness. Eventually the sense of vast, timeless, open space in every direction took over.
Floating in warm water in quiet darkness was deeply relaxing. A quieter, larger womb? A primordial tropical night ocean? Hard to say. I know that I was in the isolation tank for ninety minutes because Shanti, owner of the Be Well Spa in the Santa Cruz Mountains, told me so when I emerged. But she could have said almost anything about the passage of time outside the tank and I would have believed her. (“Welcome to the year 2020, Dr. Nichols,” she’d announce, handing me a glass of water. “Why, thank you, Shanti,” I’d reply.) I came out moving slowly, taking my time as my senses reassembled themselves. My brain felt as if I’d been staring at the ocean for hours—the kind of “mindful mindlessness” that those deeply experienced in meditation spend years trying to achieve. I’ve been in and around water all my life, but never like this. I suddenly realized why “floaters” include everyone from software engineers, high-tech entrepreneurs, writers, actors, and other creative types, NFL players, and even (reportedly) U.S. Navy SEALs. That tank wasn’t just a tube full of salty water—it was, well, what was it?44
Dr. John Lilly was one of the pioneers of research into the effects of isolation. “My research shows that when you eliminate external sources of danger, the inner experience… can be anything that you can allow yourself to experience,” he wrote in The Quiet Center, “which can contain a great peace for those ready for it.”45
Much like my own experiences, Lilly reports that for about the first forty-five minutes “the day’s residues are predominant… gradually [the floaters] begin to relax and more or less enjoy the experience.” But in the next stage the mind becomes both tense and bored. Researchers such as Dr. Donald Hebb at McGill University have looked at the effects of this kind of extreme isolation: subjects began to desire stimulation, were disoriented and confused, and eventually became delusional and hallucinated. (It’s not surprising that Amnesty International classifies extreme sensory deprivation as torture.) However, if the need for stimulation is overcome through practice or brute mental effort, Lilly said, subjects in the tank pass into “reveries and fantasies of a highly personal and emotionally charged nature,” followed by what he described as the opening of a “black curtain” into empty space. The theory is that flotation tanks allow the brain to transition from the waking state (beta waves) through the state of wakeful relaxation (alpha waves) and ultimately to the state of deep meditative consciousness akin to the moment between waking and sleeping (theta). In this altered state the mind settles into nothingness, the inner voice is silent, and often a feeling of oneness and bliss occurs—writer Seth Stevenson described it as “the closest you will ever come to having a drug-like experience without taking drugs.”46
Flotation is being tested as a treatment for a wide range of physical, mental, and emotional ailments, including chronic pain, high blood pressure, motion disorders, tension headaches, insomnia, and so on. For some reason, much of the research on flotation is coming from Sweden, where it’s been used to help highly stressed executives on the verge of burnout,47 young people with ADHD, autism, PTSD, and depression,48 stress-related physical pain,49 and even whiplash.50 Flotation has been shown to enhance creativity51 as well as mental and physical performance.52 You may never climb into a float tank. I may never find my way back to one. But the world abounds with simulacra, some quiet and others noisy, some big and some small, warm and cold, bright and dim. You will soon find yourself neck deep in water, and when you do, take some deep breaths, close your eyes, and go a little deeper.