Best Of: Gretchen Rubin’s Guide to Getting Out of Your Head and Into the World
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player
I'm Rufus Grisscombe and this is the next big idea. Today, a celebration of our five senses. is one of my favorite sounds in the world. That's the ambient hum, the bustle, as my guest today, Gretchen Rubin calls it, of the main concourse of Grand Central Station. Listen.
Hear the hurried footsteps, the indistinct voices. the purr and thrum of people on the go. Hear how it all ricochets off the 120 foot ceiling and comes back down as a kind of babbling brook. We learned last week, talking with Paul Bloom about the limitations of the human brain. Our memories, for instance, are more like impressionist paintings
than photographs. They're evocative swirls of color and feeling, not facsimiles of reality. What's more, our abilities to reason are stymied by cognitive biases, collective fallacies, poor information. But our senses, sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, they are astonishingly high fidelity, which is why more than a third of your brain is devoted to processing them.
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