Up: [[Savour]] Created: 2023-10-02 Updated: 2025-02-15 ## Factoids Seventy percent of our sense receptors are in the eyes. When light hits a red car, all of the rays other than red are absorbed by the car’s paint job. The colour we see is the one being reflected, the one that doesn’t get absorbed. Polar bears aren’t white, they are clear. Their hair shafts contain tiny air bubbles that scatter the sun’s white light so we see it as white fur. ## Try - Visit the same place every day. You will see it differently. - Collect a colour. Find ways to mass a favourite colour together. - Look around wherever you are, pick out five things you can see and name them. Close your eyes for a minute, then do it again but this time five things you didn’t see the first time. Name each thing. - Find a wide-open space to look at or look through a window if you’re indoors. Look around then select one thing and focus on the visual elements of it. For example, if looking at a tree, look at movement, dark parts, light parts, smooth parts, rough parts, point of contact with the ground, shadow and sunlight. Notice if anything changes. This time try NOT to name what you are looking at. Just be visual. - Some different ways to look at art: - Look in a hand mirror to see it reduced and reversed. - Print out an image to place it in a different context. - Squint at it, so details vanish and you see the larger piece. - Hold up a hand to block one part of it so you can see how the absence affects everything else. > [!user] Sources > Gretchen Rubin, *Life in Five Senses* > Norman Farb and Zindel Segal, *Better in Every Sense* > Diane Ackerman, *A Natural History of the Senses*