I'm reading a book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience which provides some quite interesting analysis of many concepts I've been turning over for the past couple years.
One passage of the book (the fourth paragraph of Chapter 5) strays a bit from what most of the rest of it means to me, but still alights on a topic I've been mulling recently:
Everything the body can do is potentially enjoyable. Yet many people ignore this capacity, and use their physical equipment as little as possible, leaving its ability to provide flow unexploited. When left undeveloped, the senses give us chaotic information: an untrained body moves in random and clumsy ways, an insensitive eye presents ugly or uninteresting sights, the unmusical ear mainly hears jarring noises, the coarse palate knows only insipid tastes.
I have considered before that the senses I inhabit the most are touch, hearing and smell. On reading the above passage, I identified strongly with the development of the body for purposeful and elegant movement and musicality for subtleties of sound, (and of course smell was not addressed at all), but felt apathetic towards uninterestingness of sights or insipidity of tastes.
Curiously, most of my friends have moved to big cities where they spend much of their social time pursuing fine dining. On a recent visit out west, my friend Dave ordered me my first ever meat prepared rarer than well done — it was medium or medium rare, I forget which. I was shocked, (especially as it was a burger, and I had never conceived of burgers being cooked any less through than well). It was a new experience for me, and while I totally missed out on the enjoyable burger tasting I'd anticipated, I had an entirely different one which lay open a possibility to me. Dave reacted with horror at always taking meat well done (quite as I am horrified at people who pump MP3s into their ears), telling me that there are subtleties of flavour that I will never taste if the meat is overdone. Since my visit with him and several other big city friends, I am genuinely considering ordering my next steak medium well — although of course it is not often that I even go to a restaurant of any fineness.
I wondered if it's a zero-sum game, where time spent developing sight or taste is time lost on the other three, in which case I'd rather stick with my present proclivities. Is there transference of refinement amoung the senses? I want dearly to touch and hear better, (and on the smelling front would like society to back off from assailing odour); inasmuch as developing the remaining senses would propel the former better (say, geometrically?) than attending them directly, that would be another way to expend my energies. But I don't know.
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