See What I'm Saying

This is literally an eye-opening book about the hidden powers of our five senses by an American psychologist. We quite naturally take our senses for granted, but the author shows the range of our latent capacities, which are sometimes only activated when another sense is compromised. The mixture of scientific research and actual case histories makes for absorbing reading as one becomes progressively more aware of one's own perceptual skills - a process that can enhance them - and learns more about the latest developments in perceptual science. For instance, Daniel Kish, a blind mountain biker, uses echolocation to follow trails and avoid large obstacles, and blind baseball players can learn how to use the signs of a beeping ball in order to time their strikes. Our relationship to music is much more profound than we know, while the difference in intensity between our two nostrils can enable us to track scents like dogs. I was particularly interested in the section on wine tasting and the interplay between extensive knowledge, developed vocabulary and tasting memories. It turns out that wine expertise is one of the most studied forms of perception, and that experts showed enhanced activity in brain regions where taste and smell inputs converge. There is much more to say, since each sense is given its own section, with a final part on multisensory perception.