FROM THE LAB · FIELD NOTE · SEPTEMBER 2026
Under The Lilacs
On interoception, sensory memory, and the landscapes within us.
When I was little (circa 1973, Lynbrook, New York), I used to lie underneath the lilac bush in our backyard. I loved to breathe in its rich scent.
The funny thing is, I don't remember the bush itself or why I decided to lie underneath it. I don't remember much about the external landscape at all.
What I remember is inhaling—the experience of breathing in something from the world around me and feeling its effect somewhere inside me.
The lilacs themselves have become hazy, but the sensory memory hasn't.
Early on, we learn that we have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. For a long time, I thought of sensory experience that way—as information coming from somewhere outside of myself, and then entering through one of those five familiar doors.
But our sensory lives are much richer than that.
There is a sense called interoception. Broadly speaking, interoception is our ability to sense and interpret signals arising from within the body: our heartbeat, breathing, hunger, thirst, temperature, visceral sensations and other information about our internal state. Much of this happens without our conscious awareness. Some of it, however, we can learn to notice.
I was fascinated when I first encountered the concept.
Maybe because it gave a name to a direction of attention that has interested me for a long time. We can turn our attention outward—to a sound, a scent, a texture, the world around us. But we can also turn it inward, toward the sensations and signals arising from within the body.
Increasingly, I find myself interested in what happens at the meeting place between the two.
That's part of what I'm exploring through The Sensory Lab, a developing collection of observations, experiments, and sensory experiences centered around attention and embodied awareness.
One of the questions emerging from it is deceptively simple:
How do we receive information—from the world around us and from the world within us?
And lately I've been thinking about another dimension of sensory experience: the relationship between sensation, memory, and time.
A sound can return us to another summer. A scent can return us to a backyard we can barely remember.
The memory itself may seem long gone, yet somehow it has continued to occupy a space within us. Then a sound, a smell, a texture—or a bodily sensation we can't immediately name—brushes against that space, and something that belonged to another time becomes present again.
Sensory experience can carry memory across time.
This may be one reason our memories matter so much. They aren't simply records of where we've been. Some of them remain quietly alive within us, becoming part of the internal landscape from which we experience the present.
And perhaps that childhood lilac memory isn't entirely about smell after all.
Something from the external world entered through the senses and became part of my internal landscape. More than fifty years later, the backyard scene has almost disappeared from memory. But the experience of lying beneath those lilacs and breathing them in still lives somewhere within me.
That may be why the scent of lilacs—and even the color purple—still holds a particular resonance for me.
This is what fascinates me most about interoception: it asks us to consider an entire sensory landscape that exists on the inside.
And to wonder what we might discover there simply by paying attention.