See What I’m Saying: The Extraordinary Powers of Our Five Senses
by Lawrence D. Rosenblum. W. W. Norton, 2010
Here’s some advice for your next job interview: mimic your interviewer’s gestures and mannerisms. It may sound odd, but research suggests that people think highly of individuals who mimic them, even though they do not consciously notice the copycatting. Actually, you know what? Forget that I mentioned it—you’re probably going to do it anyway. As it turns out, we typically mimic people when we really want them to like us.
This tendency to mimic—and to like being mimicked—stems from the fact that our senses and emotions are intimately and inextricably linked, argues Lawrence D. Rosenblum, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside. In his new book Rosenblum provides hundreds of fascinating examples of the ways in which our sensory entanglements influence our daily lives and make us, well, us. Not only do our senses influence our emotions and perceptions—they also influence one another and can’t really be thought of as separate entities at all.
Ever walked through the office reading a memo? You avoided colliding with the wall in part because you could hear where you were going. What happens if you eat with your eyes shut? Your meal will seem bland, because what we taste is so closely tied to what we see. And when you converse in a noisy crowd, you are really reading your friends’ lips rather than hearing what they are saying. “The long-held concept of the perceptual brain being composed of separate sense regions is being overturned,” Rosenblum writes. “Your brain seems designed around multisensory input, and much of it doesn’t care through which sense information comes.”
See What I’m Saying will help you discover abilities you never knew you had, such as perceiving personalities from faces, assessing fertility in potential partners, and locating objects by sensing their vibrations, the way a spider does on its web. When you finally put the book down—which could take a while—you might start experiencing the world in a richer way.
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Add CommentThis technique is known as mirroring. I discovered it during the 1970s when I switched my sales career into B2B after I left my job at Procter and Gamble.
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