Mental Models - Sensory Food 🥬

Issue #64

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I ingest. Not just through my mouth - but also what I ingest through the other senses. The sensory “food”.

I like this concept of sensory food that I came across in readings about religions. The concept comes from Buddhism, where it’s called The Four Nutriments. (I cherry pick from all the religions - I hope you find that beautiful rather than blasphemous.) Let me tell you a little about sensory food.

What is Sensory Food?

From The Buddha:

There are four kinds of nutriments which enable living beings to grow and maintain life.

What are these four nutriments?

The first is edible food, the second is the food of sense impressions, the third is the food of volition, and the fourth is the food of consciousness.

These second nutriment could be referred to as “sensory food”, meaning the information that we take in through our senses: sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch.

Why is this interesting?

I find the nutriment of of sense impressions or sensory food particularly interesting. There’s so much focus in society today about what we eat - and little focus on what we ingest via sound, sight, smell, and touch. From Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh:

We’re familiar with edible food … But that’s not the only kind of food we humans consume; it’s just one kind. What we read, our conversations, the shows we watch, the online games we play, and our worries, thoughts, and anxieties are all food.

It’s worth asking yourself:

What are you seeing? smelling? touching? hearing?

Who are the people you are surrounding yourself with?

What are you reading, watching, focusing on?

All of these sense impressions are making you into who you are.

I’ll leave the last word to Jac Vanek, I like her poetic take on it all:

You are the books you read, the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, and the conversations you engage in.

You are what you take from these.

You are the sound of the ocean, breath of the fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single second of every day. So drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and the colors fill your mind

Photo by Paulette Vautour

Want to go deeper?

💎 I really enjoyed Rolf Dobelli's thought-provoking manifesto on a Low New's Diet - I highly recommend reading it in full here if you find news very tempting like I do!

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits … like bright colored candies for the mind.

📖 I liked some of the advice in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction:

Don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens.

Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefly by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much.

📖 There is a lot of wisdom in Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise

🧠 Build your latticework! Revisit related mental models:

• Emotional Contagion

• Anchoring

• The Hawthorne Effect

🙏 I aim to make every issue bite sized, top shelf sensory food! If you have a friend who’d like it too, please share!