I'm Rufus Griscombe, and this is the next big idea. Today, a celebration of our five senses. I'm going to be. This is one of my favorite sounds in the world.

That's the ambient hum, the bustle, as my guest today, Gretchen Rubin calls it,

of the main concourse of Grand Central Station.

Listen.

Here are the hurried footsteps, the indistinct voices, the purr and thrum of people on the go.

Here how it all ricochets off the 120-foot ceiling and comes back down as a kind of babbling brook.

We learned last week talking with Paul Bloom about the limitations of the human brain.

Our memories, for instance, are more like impressionist paintings than photographs.

They're evocative swirls of color and feeling,

not facsimiles of reality. What's more, our abilities to reason are stymied by cognitive biases,

collective fallacies, for information. But our senses, sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch,

they are astonishingly high fidelity,

which is why more than a third of your brain is devoted to processing them.

The world around us has the potential to bedazzle, to entrance, to trigger a state of rapture.

If only we pay attention. But this paying attention business is not

easy, not easy for any of us, not easy for Gretchen Rubin. So she decided to do something about it.

She forced herself to get out of her head and into the world. That's actually the subtitle of her new book,

Life in Five Senses, How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World.

She studied the art of perfume making,

hosted ketchup taste test parties,

and visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art every single day for a year and counting. Her new book encourages us

to glory in our senses, to open our eyes, unplug our noses, take the noise-canceling

...