Sensual Intelligence - 1: Your Eyes

Leonardo da Vinci noted, with some melancholy, that the average human 'looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking.'

I always used to turn my nose up at self-help books but, recently, I've come to realise that there is some gold amongst the dross. The above quote is taken from Tony Buzan's book, Head First, which I picked up for 99p at our local Age Concern charity shop. It begins a fascinating chapter about recognising and developing our sensual intelligence which I'll gradually work through here.

The first of the senses considered is our eyes. Consider:

• Your retina, the light-receiving surface at the back of your eye, is only slightly thicker than a razor blade, yet contains 130,000,000 photoreceptor (light receiving) cells.
• Of these 130,000,000 cells, a mere 6,000,000 of them, called the cones, handle all colour vision.
• These 6,000,000 cones can process and distinguish 8,000,000 different shades of colour.
• The remaining 124,000,000 photo-receptors are called rods. They are so sensitive that they can detect and distinguish a single proton of light.
• At night the 124,000,000 rods, in order to help you survive in the dark, can increase their sensitivity 75,000 times.
• Every second billions of photons of light strike your retina. This is the equivalent of about 100 megabytes of information per second!
  

To make all this amazing information even more amazing, it isn't actually your eyes that 'see' - it is your brain. Your eye sends all its multiple gigabytes of information along your optic nerve to the back of your brain, where what is called you occipital lobe actually does your seeing for you. This it does with a few billion brain cells that perfectly reproduce reality for you.

Wow - I don't want to waste all of this potential. Buzan suggests that we give our eyes regular visual feasts. I think I will try the da Vinci training exercise:

'To sharpen his eyes and focus, Leonardo placed a complex object, like a bowl of flowers, in front of him, tried to memorize it, and then closed his eyes. With his eyes closed he tried to revisualize the object. Leonardo would then open his eyes and compare the memory with the real vision. He then looked even more closely, correcting his memory, and once again closed his eyes and revisualized the scene. He kept on doing this until he could hardly tell the difference between the vision he saw with his open eyes and the vision he saw with his mind's memory. Try it! It sharpens both your external and internal vision.'

When I took advantage of the glorious sunshine this afternoon to spend a few hours over Ampthill Park, I tried to look and see. It really does make you realise how much you miss when you don't!

Wildlife Sightings: Ampthill Park.

I was pleased with the following 35 species of birds for this time of year, noted down in the order they were seen (notable absences were song thrush & buzzard):

Robin; blackbird; goldcrest; nuthatch; magpie; starling; blue tit; wood pigeon; carrion crow; wren; coal tit; chaffinch; great tit; pied wagtail; dunnock; herring gull; rook; jay; lesser redpoll (4); jackdaw; collared dove; long-tailed tit; goldfinch; great spotted woodpecker; bullfinch (1 male & 3 female); kestrel; siskin (small flock); stock dove; redwing; fieldfare; moorhen; black-headed gull; mistle thrush; treecreeper (call); green woodpecker.

Mammals: female muntjac running across the path in front of me, closely followed by a cocker spaniel! Another female muntjac in 'Bunker Field'; common shrew under refuge.