COURSTTEY MIRRIOR FEB22
Tips to improve your senses
Here’s how to keep your five senses in fighting form
Any parent desperately trying to calm a wailing child would think their screams would wake the dead. But apparently not.

In fact, a baby crying doesn’t even feature in the top 10 noises most likely to wake up a man. So is it time to sharpen both your senses?

Hearing

While you can’t actually improve your hearing, you can improve the way you listen, says Jan de Vries, author of The Five Senses: How to Improve Taste, Smell, Touch, Sight and Hearing. So shut your eyes to cut out the other sensory input competing for your attention and pick out one instrument playing in your favourite song. “By depriving yourself of sight, you’re training your ears to provide more information and your brain to understand it better,” de Vries says.

Touch

“Even occasional exposure to intense cold can damage nerve endings and cause blood flow to be directed away from the area, leading to a loss of sensation,” says dermatologist Dr Christopher Rowland-Payne. Try boosting oxygen flow to the nerves in the sensitive upper dermis layer of the skin with foods high in vitamin B12 and the nutrient niacin, which is richest in liver and kidney, Cambridge University researchers advise.

Taste

There’s a reason why you are often given cheese if tasting wine. It dulls your senses by coating your mouth in a thin layer of fat, so any plonk tastes wonderful. “To really taste all the flavours in foods, you need to clean your taste buds by swilling water round your mouth for a few seconds between courses,” de Vries says. And try chewing for a full three seconds with each mouthful so all the salty, bitter, sweet and sour components get the chance to hit the receptors on your tongue.

Smell

To really hone your conk, you need to perfect your sniffing technique, says perfumer Harry Fremont. “Smelling very deeply forces too much air over your nasal passages,” he says. “Instead, take several smaller sniffs which help you detect the subtler ‘notes’ of an aroma better.”And try putting words to whatever you’re smelling, advises Dr Peter Brennan, an expert in smell and behaviour at the University of Cambridge. “Actively smell strong odours such as coffees or eucalyptus and come up with three adjectives to describe them,” Brennan says. This boosts the connection between your brain and olfactory — or smelling — system, he explains.

Sight

“Overly fatiguing certain eye muscles without breaks can weaken them, so you can’t focus as quickly or as well,” Andrew Lotery, Professor of Ophthalmology at Southampton University, says. So, if you spend hours staring at a computer screen, protect your vision by sticking a page of newsprint eight to ten feet away.

— Daily Mirror