Common Senses: U of T Researchers Show How ‘Sense Foraging’ Helps When Habits Let You Down

If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or like you were dragging yourself around the endless grooves of rumination, you know it can feel impossible in those moments to find a way out. But according to two U of T researchers, the solution may be a matter of allowing new information to get in. 

Enter “Sense Foraging,” the simple practice that broadens what you take in — and changes your brain metabolism in the process. 

Coined by Norman Farb, an associate professor in UTM’s Department of Psychology and Zindel Segal, Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Mood Disorders at UTSC, the technique and the theory behind it is explained in their book, Better in Every Sense: How the New Science of Sensation Can Help You Reclaim Your Life. 

Published with Little, Brown Spark in 2024, Better in Every Sense has been making the rounds on media outlets and is packed with approachable exercises designed to help people get ‘unstuck.’ 

We spoke with Prof. Farb just as some of their new research was heading to publication. Read on for our conversation on shutting down sensation, what makes us vulnerable to depression, and how he and his co-author are sharing their work with the broader public.

Jump ahead to learn more about:

• The theory behind the book
• What it looks like in practice
• Their experience publishing a trade book
• How writing for a general audience changed their approach
• Prof. Farb's new project — with support from the Research and Scholarly Activity Fund

What’s the theory behind Better in Every Sense?

After 15+ years of research, we wanted to communicate two major findings. First, stress has a hidden effect on the brain. People are often aware of negative thoughts that show up in response to a stressful or upsetting event. Accordingly, researchers often try to relate brain patterns of worry or rumination to a person’s vulnerability to mood disorders like depression or anxiety, but with limited success.

We found through neuroimaging studies that while stress does predictably activate parts of our brains linked to rumination and negative self-judgment, such activity doesn’t predict differences between people who are healthy and unhealthy. 

What's more insidious is that we’re losing track of the ability to take in new information at the same time we’re becoming fixated on solving a problem or under stress.

Almost everyone tends to worry or feel down in response to an upsetting event; it’s normal and seemingly inevitable. But what varies between people is how much stress leads them to shut down the sensory parts of the brain. The more a person blocks out sensation, the more likely they are to feel depressed and to spiral into clinically significant levels of depression. Rumination is something we are aware of, but the loss of sensation, the ability to take in new information, is often insidious and hidden to us. The cost of this sensory shut down is that it leaves us without new information even as we become fixated on problem-solving or managing stress.

So, stress shutting down sensation is major finding #1. The other major finding is that really paying attention to what you see, hear, or feel shifts is enough to shift metabolism in the brain to rebalance thinking and sensing.

So, if stress is shutting down sensation, starving us of new information and therefore new ideas, focusing on sensation resets the balance and helps us start moving mentally again. New information from the world and inside our bodies helps with generating new ideas — and it doesn’t require specialized equipment or even years of practice. You already know how to do it. 

It’s more difficult for people who have a history or a pattern of blocking sensation, but you can practice it and get better at it over time.

What does it look like in practice?

You must have the intention. The mindset. And I recommend practicing when you aren’t stressed because you won’t be predisposed to block out sensation. 

Pick a sensory domain that’s comfortable for you and make a game of it — being playful is antithetical to the stress mindset. If you’re a visual person, look around the room and see if you notice something you haven’t looked at for weeks, months, or maybe ever. If you want to go into the auditory channel, try noticing a sound that’s very subtle or so ubiquitous that you’ve been blocking it out: the sound of your own breathing, or the AC, or little creaks in the building. 

There’s also feeling inside the body: Where is somewhere in my body that I never pay attention to? How does it feel right now? 

Remember: We’re trying to broaden what is relevant in our minds by broadening what we take in through the senses. All this time, you’re diverting resources away from whatever has been bothering you. 

And that’s enough to change brain metabolism.

This book is very approachable and practical. What was your thought process in writing a trade book rather than an academic book?

It came from this dissatisfaction with the knowledge that we know a lot of things that can be helpful for people, but we’re just not getting through. We were very intentional about trying to reach an audience that may never read a research paper but wants to know tools and techniques that are informed by science. 

From that place we were thinking about how to draw people in, and we realized we’d need to share concrete experiences — after all, part of the message we’re sending is that things change through experience. We then give them a bit of the science to help contextualize what we think is happening in that experience and then we walk them through what to do with that information. 

So, each chapter has the same formula: story, science, practical exercise.

How did your views on writing for a wider audience change throughout the process? Has it affected how you will write in the future?

It’s changed how we talk about what we do. In the book, there are references to papers and data, but we ended up editing out a lot of things we would have otherwise nerded out about! We moved from initial drafts that were roughly 50% documenting a study to a page or two in a chapter talking about the study itself. 

The purpose of writing is to try to lead someone into an experience. And if they have an experience that has some value, they may want to be fed some more conceptual knowledge. But not before. 

In Better in Every Sense, we preach that playing with conceptual knowledge rarely leads to meaningful changes in a person’s quality of life. In fact, noticing that you are stuck in the same train of thought every day is an important moment of insight. One a person has that, there’s something they can do to help them feel less stuck, feel more engaged — those are the important connections we want them to make.

The magic happens when you stop and take in things you’re not sure what to do about. That’s where creativity, plasticity, brain growth, and new ideas come from. Stop, take a breath, and question what you might be filtering out. 

Those are the moments that are actually going to make a difference.

And as two people who are deeply steeped in the clinical mindfulness research area, we also realized that practicing mindfulness is an intense and very specific thing people might do if they’ve experienced something such as a major depressive episode. Most people in the world will never do formal meditation, for example. 

So, we had to think about how we could share the principle of what might work for people in meditation? In this book, it’s more about understanding the mechanism and explaining that there are many access points to that mechanism — and the more inviting and natural those seem to you, the more likely you are to do them. 

You recently received funding from UTM’s Research and Scholarly Activity Fund (RSAF) for your project, “The Interoceptive Change Awareness Task (ICAT).” Can you share a bit about what you’re working on?

The task is a passion project that I’ve been working on for more than a decade. Meditation is all about attending to sensory stimuli like the breath, but it’s also steeped in a lot of mystical or religious stuff that can turn people off, quite frankly. 

I wanted to get away from the many things happening in traditional meditation and create a technologically supported way for people to explore their breath sensation. We developed a way to have people breathe along with what is right now just a circle on a screen, but we’re eventually going to gamify this. 

We can change how the breathing prompt changes and manipulate whether people are aware of changes in their breathing. Then we can explore interesting questions around what happens when their breathing speeds up and what happens when it speeds up and they don’t know. 

No one to my knowledge has so far been able to non-invasively manipulate a person’s arousal level quickly and repeatedly and to track their awareness of that change in rate.

The task measures two things: How sensitive are you to changes in your physiology? And how do you feel doing this task? 

A lot of people who do meditation or yoga, for instance, think that they’re becoming more exquisite detectors of change, so they’re becoming more sensitive and therefore they’ll make better decisions. But one population that is great at noticing changes in their bodies is people with anxiety and panic disorders. So, just being aware of changes isn’t always that great.

We can learn a lot about what aspects of body awareness matter for well-being — and because we can manipulate awareness, we can test this widely held idea that the point of being aware of your emotions is to prevent them from creeping into other areas of your life.

One of the short-term goals I have for this task is to clearly establish that what is most related to well-being isn’t detecting changes; it’s people’s confidence or enjoyment of going into their senses, into their breath. Cultivating a positive attitude about these sensations is what is going to give us the best return for our mental health.

Do you have exciting new research you want to share with the wider public? Farb and Segal knew they had a lot of helpful information that had the potential to change people’s lives, but that academic jargon likely wouldn’t get through. They wrote their book in an approachable way that would reach diverse audiences — and then they got to work sharing it. Here are Farb’s top tips for getting started.