A similar thing happened to me with music as a result of practicing mindfulness meditation. I was listening to music in my car and I thought “Well, I should bring some mindfulness to this task.” One of the common things you do in mindfulness is try to direct your mental attention at more specific aspects of something you are perceiving, and I realized that by paying attention to individual musical instruments it actually had a significant impact on how the song seemed. I wasn’t exactly surprised, because many things are like this (maybe everything?) but it was neat how strongly your mind can filter out other aspects. This is fundamentally the same as when people write tasting notes for wine, or when a designer focuses on the blank space in a design, or when you pay attention to the feeling of your butt on your chair.
Next time you are eating, try to pay separate attention to the flavor, the smell and the texture of what you’re eating. Also pay attention to the way it feels different to swallow the food than to chew it. If you are hungry, you may notice that the satisfaction-sensation from eating actually comes from the act of swallowing, rather than chewing, which is why diets where you chew food and spit it out have never been popular.
A similar thing happened to me with music as a result of practicing mindfulness meditation. I was listening to music in my car and I thought “Well, I should bring some mindfulness to this task.” One of the common things you do in mindfulness is try to direct your mental attention at more specific aspects of something you are perceiving, and I realized that by paying attention to individual musical instruments it actually had a significant impact on how the song seemed. I wasn’t exactly surprised, because many things are like this (maybe everything?) but it was neat how strongly your mind can filter out other aspects. This is fundamentally the same as when people write tasting notes for wine, or when a designer focuses on the blank space in a design, or when you pay attention to the feeling of your butt on your chair.
Next time you are eating, try to pay separate attention to the flavor, the smell and the texture of what you’re eating. Also pay attention to the way it feels different to swallow the food than to chew it. If you are hungry, you may notice that the satisfaction-sensation from eating actually comes from the act of swallowing, rather than chewing, which is why diets where you chew food and spit it out have never been popular.