Making Sense of your Senses - A Sensory Intelligence Star

Many people think of Walt Disney as a city-born businessman and movie producer, with a creative flair for entertaining children and their families. This is partly true, but the whole truth is much more interesting, and reveals a genius of Sensual Intelligence.

Walt Disney was actually born, and spent most of his childhood, on a farm in Missouri. As soon as he had finished school, he went not into business or to university, but to an art school, where he immersed himself in the exploration of visual and tactile media.

Walt rapidly realized that his talents lay in translating the senses into film. He was the first to introduce sound into cartoons, when he featured Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willy. Again he scored a visual first when he filmed Flowers and Trees (1932): this was the first film of any kind to be made in complete Technicolor®.

He continued his sensually pioneering ways, producing in 1940 Fantasia, a film generally thought to be nearly half-a-century ahead of its time! In Fantasia Disney created a feast for the senses, asking the viewer to imagine what anyone might imagine while listening to beautiful music. Using cartoon technology that to this day has not been matched, he accomplished the brilliant feat of transforming one sense into another. He was able with his cartoon techniques to make the viewer see sound; to taste vision; to hear shapes; to feel colour; and to touch rhythm.

Continuing his mission to use and stimulate all the senses in and by his work, after the war Disney began to use a series of short real-life films that showed hitherto unseen close-ups of animals in natural settings. In order to bring the senses more realistically to life, he insisted that his artists observe every vision, movement and sound of the animals so as to absorb their most subtle and real nuances. Those who worked with him were in aw of his Multiple Intelligences. They reported that Disney kept entire multi-sensory films, second-by-second, detail-by-detail, sense-by-sense, perfectly in his memory.

Adapted from: Head First by TONY BUZAN