Sense Enhancement
The ability to heighten one’s senses through training is inherently obvious to anyone who has a disability. While we tend to think of visually impaired people with better-than-average hearing, or a deaf person who can sense vibrations coming up from behind, we may not remember that proprioception (body position) and vestibular (balance) sensations are often heightened in people with physical impairments.
The common adage is that losing one sense makes you more dependent on the others, which is true. But a person with a full contingent of senses can easily increase awareness without losing a single one.
Although conventional wisdom holds there are five senses, there are indeed other senses that people have: as mentioned above, proprioception and balance are true senses, as is the sensation of pressure changes, temperature changes, and other physical indicators about the environment. These, too, can be trained in much the same manner.
The limitations of this training are mostly up to the individual. While the ability to hear a person’s heart rate in another room is obviously without true evidence, there is nothing unrealistic about determining the proportions of ingredients in food by one or two tastes, identifying the source of “the burning smell” by the characteristics of the faint scent, and hearing the distinctive respiratory sound of someone in a quiet room who recently smoked a cigarette. However, there are limitations to the nervous system: for example, a person very sensitive to temperature changes will never be able to detect a change of one degree (either Fahrenheit or centigrade) across several minutes.
That said, the process to train the senses is fairly simple and works similarly.
One morning, before rising out of bed, lay very still and listen. Simply slow your breathing (exhaling produces a faint white noise than can distinctly mask your ability to hear), and let your ear detect whatever it hears. Obviously, these will be the loudest sounds near you. Acknowledge them, but keep listening. As your brain processes the sound information, you will become aware of fainter or more distant sounds. Identify and acknowledge each, and keep listening for a few minutes. By the third or fourth minute only, you will begin recognizing many sounds you otherwise would not have noticed.
At night, relax in a chair. As with the previous exercise, it helps to relax; this way, distractions are kept to a minimum. As you become comfortable in a chair, slowly inhale through your nose. Let all the aromas and scents around you vie for attention. Simply acknowledge each, in the same manner you did with hearing. You will become aware of any scents on your clothing, and less distinctly the chair you are resting in. You may smell odors from cooking or the outside. Often, you may become aware of a flat, slightly metallic scent of dust on nearby surfaces. The ability to develop the sense of smell is so tunable that thousands of people can identify wine varieties by sniffing the glass. One intriguing demonstration of this was an animal control specialist who could identify what animals (and respective gender) lived in or passed through an area by sniffing the air: subsequent confirmation proved him correct across the board.
At home, rest in a chair and face the window. Stare out the window for a few moments. Identify any movement that occurs: from the blatant car that passes to the bird that quietly glides by in the distance. Note the effect of wind on tree leaves, cloud motions, and light reflections. Contrary to some suggestions, increasing your ability to see is more about detecting motion than identifying details. For example, closing your eyes and trying to recall the exact order of flower colors in a neighbor’s planter box is more about observation than seeing. For this exercise, you merely want to observe motion more than detail. Memory games and training observation can be done another time.
A few minutes of this per day pays dividends quickly. Over a matter of two or three weeks, you will begin to detect sensations faster. What at first is an interesting exercise (that last a few minutes) soon becomes an effect that lasts for hours and eventually all day.
Mix up the exercises. In the morning, close your eyes and try to identify the position of every joint in your body, head to toe, and whether it is flexed, extended, or relaxed. How much pressure are you exerting on your feet, or shoulder, or neck? On the commute home from work or school, feel how the temperature shifts as you move in and out of sunlight or a breeze. The next time you eat, try to identify the subtleties in your taste.
It is critical to remember that you are not unlocking any great secrets or hidden abilities: you are simply learning to pay closer attention to detail that is already there. Enhancing your senses is somewhat like learning to read: once you learn, you cannot turn it off. Eventually, you will learn to spot the subtle information your eyes, ears, nose, skin, tongue, and nervous system have been communicating your whole life.