Missed the start of the Festival? No sweat! Here's what we covered in week 3:

Even the simplest single-cell organisms come equipped with the ability to move towards resources and away from danger. In a fun Festival co-incidence, this year's Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded for work that began with showing how algae move towards the light they need to flourish.

Humans and algae are separated by a few hundred million years of evolution, and as you'd expect, more complex creatures need more complex abilities to sense and respond to what's going on.

"Sensing" is much more than just sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, although knowing what's going on in the external world (exteroception) is important. Just as important are the senses that keep us moving confidently through shifting environments (balance, proprioception), and those that signal how our internal fuel balance is going (interoception).

It's this last one that many of us have learned to ignore. In the interests of keeping classrooms manageable, hungry kids learn to "wait til recess." To get hard things done, tired team members learn to "just push through."

Those aren't bad skills to have, but if you've ever found yourself surprised by how hungry or tired you are when you stop to notice, that's a sign your interoception might not be doing its main job: pointing you towards what you really need to flourish. If you've learned to ignore the big signals, what are the chances you're noticing the subtler ones?

So this week is all about simple ways to tune that gauge.