What do you think?
Rate this book
Sensehacking
How can the furniture in your home affect your well-being? What colour clothing will help you play sport better? And what simple trick will calm you after a tense day at work? In this revelatory book, pioneering and entertaining Oxford professor Charles Spence shows how our senses change how we think and feel, and how by 'hacking' them we can reduce stress, become more productive and be happier.
We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, and yet it's the scent of expensive face cream that removes wrinkles (temporarily) and the noise of the crowd really does affect the referee's decision. Sensehacking explores how the senses are stimulated in nature, at home, in the workplace and at play. Using cutting-edge science, Spence shows how the senses interact and affect our minds and bodies.
We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, and yet it's the scent of expensive face cream that removes wrinkles (temporarily) and the noise of the crowd really does affect the referee's decision. Sensehacking explores how the senses are stimulated in nature, at home, in the workplace and at play. Using cutting-edge science, Spence shows how the senses interact and affect our minds and bodies.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published January 14, 2021
24 people are currently reading
303 people want to read
About the author
Charles Spence
33 books33 followersProf. Charles Spence is an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford. He is the head of the Crossmodal Research group which specializes in the research about the integration of information across different sensory modalities.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 3, 2022
Sensehacking by Charles Spence is a scientific exploration on our senses, on how to understand them, "hack" them and make the most use of them.
I must say it was a fun and entertaining read, but more in a "fun facts you'd find in a magazine" kind of way than in a scientific, deeply researched kind of way, which I expected.
A lot of the sensehacks were quite familiar to me and there wasn't anything surprisingly new I've learned, but I don't regret reading the book. It was a light read.
I must say it was a fun and entertaining read, but more in a "fun facts you'd find in a magazine" kind of way than in a scientific, deeply researched kind of way, which I expected.
A lot of the sensehacks were quite familiar to me and there wasn't anything surprisingly new I've learned, but I don't regret reading the book. It was a light read.
February 14, 2021
While the book itself provides plenty of great insight into research and studies surrounding how our environment affects our senses and perception of the world, I felt it did little to provide practical advice on how the everyday person could "use the power of their senses for happier, healthier living."
I found that I had to occasionally flip back to the front of the cover to double check what I was reading because at times it felt as though I wasn't quite connecting some of the contents in the book to its title.
Overall, this book felt more like a series of "fun facts about your senses" rather than "how-to's", though I will admit, I was very much "sensehacked" by the gorgeous cover of this book.
I found that I had to occasionally flip back to the front of the cover to double check what I was reading because at times it felt as though I wasn't quite connecting some of the contents in the book to its title.
Overall, this book felt more like a series of "fun facts about your senses" rather than "how-to's", though I will admit, I was very much "sensehacked" by the gorgeous cover of this book.
November 13, 2024
Professor Charles Spence is the world expert in multisensory perception. Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University. He has consulted for Unilever, PepsiCo and Nestlé.
many of those losing vision later in life can still picture their loved ones when hearing their voices. This can help to soften the blow of sensory loss, at least for a while. But when we lose the ability to smell, there really is nothing left of that sense. our mind’s-eye.
from Dulux to Durex
So what exactly is sensehacking? It can be defined as using the power of the senses, and sensory stimulation, to help improve our social, cognitive and emotional well-being.
feel more relaxed or more alert. sleep better
sensehacking is here to help you to achieve your goals and aspirations
engaging the power of the senses to help motivate, energize and distract
making themselves healthier, wealthier and wiser by using the latest insights from the world of sensehacking
smiles over frowns. ninety-seven of the one hundred bestselling men’s dress watches on Amazon.com, showed this time. The position of the hands at 10.10 makes it seem like it is smiling. anthropomorphism in product design
just think about how the actor’s voice always seems to come from their lips on the cinema screen. the voices actually emerge from loudspeakers. The ‘ventriloquism effect’
Superadditivity: when 1 + 1 = 3
there is also evidence to suggest that the airborne mould and other unidentified lowlevel odorants in people’s homes may be responsible, at least in part, for the debilitating condition known as sick building syndrome, whereby the building in which you work and/or live can actually make you ill.
brew some coffee, bake some bread or a cake and/or put out some fresh flowers when prospective buyers view your home. The smell of vanilla is apparently particularly popular with North American real-estate brokers.
the perfect smell to sell a new home actually consists of a mixture of white tea and fig.
The idea was for this fragrance to be dispersed via the apartment’s air-conditioning system, thus giving their property a truly unique olfactory identity
flowers, pot pourri or perhaps one of those battery-powered scent-dispensers.
Round shapes do just the opposite. A circular or elliptical coffee table changes a living room from a space for sedate, restrained interaction to a lively center for conversation and impromptu games.’
those sitting around a round table are more likely to come to agreement than those seated at a square or rectangular one.
the smell of lemon or lavender, to ensure that your freshly laundered towels smell nice.
residents’ rooms in six identical buildings were painted in six different colours and the students’ impressions were collected a little over a year later. The most popular colour was blue, followed by green, violet, orange, yellow and red.
galvanic skin response (a measure of how much you sweat)
performers waiting to go on stage used to wait in a ‘green room’ that was literally green.
most of us set our homes to a fairly uniform 17–23°C (63–73°F)
bubblegum pink
So what, then, are some of my top tips for sensehacking the dining table to make that special meal really special? Classical music would seem like a good idea, given that it primes notions of quality and class. Soft lighting can’t do any harm. My all-time favourite, though, has to be to make sure you get out the heaviest cutlery that you can find. If you must have the TV on, try to watch something like Downton Abbey or perhaps an episode of The Crown.
Getting the sound of the fridge door right when it closes is equally important at the high end of the kitchen appliance market. In fact, the design of fridge doors actually has more in common with the design of car doors than you might think. In both cases, having the right secure sound and feel is key.
single-person households. In Sweden, for example, 51.4 per cent of households comprise just one person (this is the highest figure in Europe). The figure in the UK is currently running at 31.1 per cent. The growth of solo living is leading to a worrying rise in loneliness, and at the same time more of us eating alone than ever before.
the most important challenges in the years ahead concerns how we can connect solo diners at home via digital technology.
hot water at the end of the day can help us get to sleep.
A bath will use something like eighty litres of water, an eight-minute shower uses around sixty-two.
shiny we think our hair is after a wash (assuming that we have hair, that is)
Swedish researchers have demonstrated that people recover more rapidly from a stressful maths test in the presence of nature sounds as compared to when their ears are assaulted by road traffic noise.
aromatherapy, soundscapes
Photographers know only too well that people look better in the warm golden yellow light of the late afternoon than in the colder bluer hues of early morning.
we spend something like a third of our lives sleeping. While many of you have undoubtedly heard of those legendary characters like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who could apparently operate effectively on as little as four or five hours’ sleep a night, it may well be more than mere coincidence that both world leaders subsequently went on to develop dementia in their later years.
Vitality’s 2019 ‘Britain’s Healthiest Workplace’ study revealed a correlation between income and sleep quality, with 57 per cent of those on less than £10,000 a year reporting sleep problems as compared to just 23 per cent of those who earned more than £150,000.
‘sleep hygiene’ and ‘sleep engineering’
we sleep in cycles of roughly ninety minutes, including non-rapid eye movement sleep, followed by rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (where everything but our eyes are paralysed) and then slow-wave sleep. It is the last one you really need to make sure you get enough of in order to consolidate memories.
Simple fixes include everything from more exercise to sex. fn1 According to the experts, we should not eat for at least a couple of hours before we sleep, as much for the sake of our waistline as for enhanced ‘sleep hygiene’. Drinking alcohol in the evening lowers the quality of our sleep too, as does ingesting caffeine or other stimulants. Most people already know about many of these suggestions, though, for whatever reason, choose to ignore them.
2015 survey of 1,000 North Americans, 71 per cent of us sleep with, or next to, our smartphones
2015 study, 12 those who read an electronic book on a light-emitting ereader in the hours before bedtime take longer to fall asleep, feel less sleepy in the evening, secrete less melatonin, show less next-morning alertness than those who read a print book. blue light being especially bad as it can trick our brains into thinking it is time to wake up
little evidence supporting the sleep-enhancing properties of chamomile tea.
research published in Nature, sleeping increased the likelihood of people solving an insight problem more than an equivalent period of time during the day, or a nocturnal period of wakefulness. This is what is referred to as the ‘ah-ha’ moment. creative solutions were up threefold following a good night’s sleep.
anything that you can do to help lower your core body temperature, preferably by about 1°C, is likely a good idea, since this is the key parameter driving sleep onset. the hands and feet, along with the head, are the skin sites where thermo-regulation by means of increased arterial blood flow is most effective.
Minimize any auditory distraction with earplugs or ‘white noise’. Use heavy curtains, blackout blinds, or even just an eye mask to help block out as much of the light as possible, since this is one of the most powerful sensory cues telling your brain it’s time to wake up. 21 The one other tip that has been documented to improve sleep recently is rocking, as in the children’s lullaby ‘Rock-a-bye baby’.
English ivy, for instance, helps to tackle airborne mould, eliminating most of it in a matter of just a few hours. Madagascan areca palm, then you might like to know that it came out top in terms of mopping up airborne pollutants.
Around 30 per cent of the population are night owls, 40 per cent are larks, and the rest fall somewhere in between. UK Biobank and the gene-testing site 23andMe assessed almost 680,000 people, 86,000 of whom had their sleep timing measured with an activity monitor. Using genome-wide data, 351 genetic loci associated with being a lark were identified.
‘new-car smell’ is almost always an artificial concoction from a fragrance lab. there are even annual lists of the best-smelling new cars. This car cologne, if you will, is sprayed into the cabin just before the car is returned to the customer. According to Hugh Hadland, Managing Director of S. C. Gordon Ltd, the coachbuilders of Rolls-Royce cars,
some models of the Volkswagen Golf have ‘soundaktors’ installed. These sound actuators help boost the roar of the engine. ‘sport’ mode then the engine will suddenly start to growl. Not only that, but the background lighting inside the car turns from white to bright red. Does something so simple really convince people that the car that they are driving is more powerful? sound that really can help to seal the deal.
dashboards sound just right when tapped. That, along with the sound of the horn, turns out to be a surprisingly important driver of car sales.
1932 book titled Consumer engineering was, ‘Make it snuggle in the palm.’
Talking on the phone while driving increases the risk of having an accident fourfold. This is roughly equivalent to what is seen as the drink/driving limit in many countries is reached. Hand-held or hands-free, the risks are roughly the same. it is the inability to divide attention effectively between eye and ear that is the fundamental issue.
The research shows that your risk of having an accident while texting at the wheel goes up by a staggering twenty-three times.
scent displays will one day be used to arouse dozy drivers rather than the loud and unpleasant auditory alerts we came across earlier. Pumping out an arousing ambient scent such as cinnamon, peppermint, rosemary, eucalyptus or lemon
Stimulating two senses is normally better than stimulating one
The Japanese have a word for those who literally work themselves to death– karoshi. So serious is the problem that in 2018 the government there was forced to introduce legislation limiting the amount of overtime that workers are allowed to perform – no more than 100 hours in a single month, and a maximum of 720 hours in a year.
Harvard Business Review, 62 per cent of high-earning individuals work more than 50 hours a week, 35 per cent work more than 60 hours a week and 10 per cent work more than 80 hours.
John Pencavel from Stanford University, is that analysis of female munitions workers pulling 70-hour weeks during the First World War (this a classic study in the field) revealed that they did not get much more done than those working just 56 hours.
Tiffany Field and her colleagues in Florida showing that a fifteen-minute massage at lunchtime enhances people’s concentration in the afternoon.
Josiah Wedgwood, the eighteenth-century British industrialist, has been credited with the idea of keeping the workplace clean. He is probably the one you should blame for the now widespread ‘lean’ approach to office design.
Emma, the office worker of the future. Red eyes, hunched back, headaches and a host of other health problems.
The difference in thermal comfort between the sexes is not small either. According to one study, the most striking difference is between European and North American men and Japanese women, who prefer an ambient temperature that is an average of 3.1°C (5.6°F) higher than the 22.1°C (71.8°F) preferred by the Western men.
men typically have more heat-producing muscle mass than women, and so their metabolic rates are much higher (up to 30 per cent faster, in fact). Unfortunately for female office workers, the building guidelines that were established some decades ago were based on what would make an elevenstone forty-year-old man maximally comfortable, thermally speaking.
Given that the battle for the thermostat is unlikely to go away any time soon. temperature-controlled seats, as already found in many high-end cars.
When was the last time you felt sleepy at work?
journal Sleep in 2006 stated that a dose of bright afternoon light (something you might equally well get from a special lamp as from the great outdoors, assuming that the sun is shining) helps tackle sleepiness after lunch. 19 Meanwhile, playing background music has been shown to help reduce boredom and improve the productivity of factory workers and typists by as much as 1020 per cent.
biggest problems with open-plan offices, though, is noise, especially from other people’s conversations.
Something that I like to do is to place a natural object on my desk – a stone, a pine cone, a chestnut or a piece of tree bark; something with a natural feel to contrast with all the artificially smooth surfaces that fill my office environment.
Dutch researchers documented a 15 per cent increase in sales when they diffused a synthetic melon scent through a supermarket.
chocolate is one of the world’s most desirable aromas. Coffee is another of the world’s most-liked aromas.
coffee sales at the service station can be more than tripled simply by spritzing drivers with the synthetic aroma of freshly ground coffee while they are filling up at the pumps out on the forecourt.
Intelligent scent dispensers
olfactory marketing campaign
The piece warned commuters, especially those on the Underground, to be extremely cautious should they smell almonds, since cyanide is made from almonds, just like the drink! How unlucky can you be?
London-based marketing agencies that I worked with a few years ago decided to send a taxi around the capital’s streets pumping out the smell of McCain’s Ready Baked potatoes. There were even a few 3D video signs
shoppers were shown to spend 38 per cent more when slow as opposed to fast music was played (60 vs 108 bpm)
According to a report that appeared in Businessweek magazine, Chipotle carefully controls the tempo of the music that is beamed out to all 1,500 of its stores: they deliberately play faster music at busy times of day
‘critter brands’ – those wines that display a recognizable critter on their label: a giraffe, an emu, a toad, or what have you. While the critters may not have anything to do with the wine itself, the idea is that their presence on the label helps the confused shopper to remember, and hence to find once again, the bottle that they enjoyed so much last time. At least they can avoid asking for a tongue-twisting bottle of Eitelsbacher Karthäuserhofberg Riesling Kabinett
In 2017, Debra Zellner and her colleagues from Montclair State University, New Jersey, found that playing some flamenco in a North American university canteen led to increased sales of paella while playing Italian music led to increased sales of chicken Parmesan. We also tend to spend more on wine or a meal out when classical music is playing rather than other styles such as pop.
signs in a shop saying ‘Touch me’
MacBook Pro screens in the Apple store are tilted at exactly the same angle (70°, should you want to know)? This is far from the best viewing angle, so why, I ask you, would they do that? According to one commentator, it is so that shoppers will be tempted to adjust the screen in order to see better.
Bertil Hultén has shown that the probability of shoppers touching the glassware in an IKEA store can be increased simply by turning the ambient lighting down, 43 and a dramatic increase in sales of those products (65 per cent) was reported when also adding a pleasant vanilla fragrance. (This figure is based on a sample of around 900 shoppers with sales monitored over two successive weekends.
the chances are that it had already been fondled by an average of six shoppers before you finally put it into your basket. when researchers swabbed the screens at eight different UK branches of McDonald’s they found faecal matter
slow-tempo music would have relaxed the shoppers while the citrus scent may well have aroused them. 51 As such, combining an arousing scent with relaxing music may have left shoppers confused.
selling us these pipe dreams
‘What does $20 million burning smell like? Just ask DigiScents!
British Medical Journal, music, most often classical, can be heard somewhere between 62 and 72 per cent of the time in surgery.
improved performance when tackling a stressful lab task if they were allowed to listen to their preferred choice of music rather than working in silence or being forced to listen to the music provided by the experimenters.
Many people exhibit elevated blood pressure in a medical setting, something known as ‘white-coat hypertension’. Intriguingly, this phenomenon can be reduced simply by mounting landscape photographs on the walls of the examination room.
You might also want to take your date to a thriller movie next time you have ulterior motives for wanting to visit a cinema.
If I could take your face and average the two sides, making you look a little more symmetrical in the process, you would be rated as more attractive by others
Another way to gain a competitive advantage in the mating game is to play the guitar. In one small online study the likelihood that female students would respond to a Facebook friendship request from a young man increased when he was pictured holding said instrument.
women tend to be less interested in looks and rather prioritize the smell and sound of potential mates.
obvious, being rich appears not to harm a man’s reproductive chances either.
the ratio of the second to the fourth finger, what is known as the 2D:4D digit ratio, ought to be sexy too, especially when the ratio is low.
orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that responds to the attractiveness of male faces.
scent can sometimes actually be more effective when it is presented just below the threshold for awareness
‘Women across the world expend a great deal of time, energy, and money choosing clothes, accessories, and shades of make-up that enhance their attractiveness.’
So, next time you upload some pictures onto that dating site, make sure to smile while looking directly into the camera. Holding a guitar probably won’t harm your chances either. I’d also recommend getting the pictures you upload peer reviewed, while thinking carefully about how much red you show. And as soon as you get the chance, make sure to spray some pleasant fragrance into the air.
many of those losing vision later in life can still picture their loved ones when hearing their voices. This can help to soften the blow of sensory loss, at least for a while. But when we lose the ability to smell, there really is nothing left of that sense. our mind’s-eye.
from Dulux to Durex
So what exactly is sensehacking? It can be defined as using the power of the senses, and sensory stimulation, to help improve our social, cognitive and emotional well-being.
feel more relaxed or more alert. sleep better
sensehacking is here to help you to achieve your goals and aspirations
engaging the power of the senses to help motivate, energize and distract
making themselves healthier, wealthier and wiser by using the latest insights from the world of sensehacking
smiles over frowns. ninety-seven of the one hundred bestselling men’s dress watches on Amazon.com, showed this time. The position of the hands at 10.10 makes it seem like it is smiling. anthropomorphism in product design
just think about how the actor’s voice always seems to come from their lips on the cinema screen. the voices actually emerge from loudspeakers. The ‘ventriloquism effect’
Superadditivity: when 1 + 1 = 3
there is also evidence to suggest that the airborne mould and other unidentified lowlevel odorants in people’s homes may be responsible, at least in part, for the debilitating condition known as sick building syndrome, whereby the building in which you work and/or live can actually make you ill.
brew some coffee, bake some bread or a cake and/or put out some fresh flowers when prospective buyers view your home. The smell of vanilla is apparently particularly popular with North American real-estate brokers.
the perfect smell to sell a new home actually consists of a mixture of white tea and fig.
The idea was for this fragrance to be dispersed via the apartment’s air-conditioning system, thus giving their property a truly unique olfactory identity
flowers, pot pourri or perhaps one of those battery-powered scent-dispensers.
Round shapes do just the opposite. A circular or elliptical coffee table changes a living room from a space for sedate, restrained interaction to a lively center for conversation and impromptu games.’
those sitting around a round table are more likely to come to agreement than those seated at a square or rectangular one.
the smell of lemon or lavender, to ensure that your freshly laundered towels smell nice.
residents’ rooms in six identical buildings were painted in six different colours and the students’ impressions were collected a little over a year later. The most popular colour was blue, followed by green, violet, orange, yellow and red.
galvanic skin response (a measure of how much you sweat)
performers waiting to go on stage used to wait in a ‘green room’ that was literally green.
most of us set our homes to a fairly uniform 17–23°C (63–73°F)
bubblegum pink
So what, then, are some of my top tips for sensehacking the dining table to make that special meal really special? Classical music would seem like a good idea, given that it primes notions of quality and class. Soft lighting can’t do any harm. My all-time favourite, though, has to be to make sure you get out the heaviest cutlery that you can find. If you must have the TV on, try to watch something like Downton Abbey or perhaps an episode of The Crown.
Getting the sound of the fridge door right when it closes is equally important at the high end of the kitchen appliance market. In fact, the design of fridge doors actually has more in common with the design of car doors than you might think. In both cases, having the right secure sound and feel is key.
single-person households. In Sweden, for example, 51.4 per cent of households comprise just one person (this is the highest figure in Europe). The figure in the UK is currently running at 31.1 per cent. The growth of solo living is leading to a worrying rise in loneliness, and at the same time more of us eating alone than ever before.
the most important challenges in the years ahead concerns how we can connect solo diners at home via digital technology.
hot water at the end of the day can help us get to sleep.
A bath will use something like eighty litres of water, an eight-minute shower uses around sixty-two.
shiny we think our hair is after a wash (assuming that we have hair, that is)
Swedish researchers have demonstrated that people recover more rapidly from a stressful maths test in the presence of nature sounds as compared to when their ears are assaulted by road traffic noise.
aromatherapy, soundscapes
Photographers know only too well that people look better in the warm golden yellow light of the late afternoon than in the colder bluer hues of early morning.
we spend something like a third of our lives sleeping. While many of you have undoubtedly heard of those legendary characters like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who could apparently operate effectively on as little as four or five hours’ sleep a night, it may well be more than mere coincidence that both world leaders subsequently went on to develop dementia in their later years.
Vitality’s 2019 ‘Britain’s Healthiest Workplace’ study revealed a correlation between income and sleep quality, with 57 per cent of those on less than £10,000 a year reporting sleep problems as compared to just 23 per cent of those who earned more than £150,000.
‘sleep hygiene’ and ‘sleep engineering’
we sleep in cycles of roughly ninety minutes, including non-rapid eye movement sleep, followed by rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (where everything but our eyes are paralysed) and then slow-wave sleep. It is the last one you really need to make sure you get enough of in order to consolidate memories.
Simple fixes include everything from more exercise to sex. fn1 According to the experts, we should not eat for at least a couple of hours before we sleep, as much for the sake of our waistline as for enhanced ‘sleep hygiene’. Drinking alcohol in the evening lowers the quality of our sleep too, as does ingesting caffeine or other stimulants. Most people already know about many of these suggestions, though, for whatever reason, choose to ignore them.
2015 survey of 1,000 North Americans, 71 per cent of us sleep with, or next to, our smartphones
2015 study, 12 those who read an electronic book on a light-emitting ereader in the hours before bedtime take longer to fall asleep, feel less sleepy in the evening, secrete less melatonin, show less next-morning alertness than those who read a print book. blue light being especially bad as it can trick our brains into thinking it is time to wake up
little evidence supporting the sleep-enhancing properties of chamomile tea.
research published in Nature, sleeping increased the likelihood of people solving an insight problem more than an equivalent period of time during the day, or a nocturnal period of wakefulness. This is what is referred to as the ‘ah-ha’ moment. creative solutions were up threefold following a good night’s sleep.
anything that you can do to help lower your core body temperature, preferably by about 1°C, is likely a good idea, since this is the key parameter driving sleep onset. the hands and feet, along with the head, are the skin sites where thermo-regulation by means of increased arterial blood flow is most effective.
Minimize any auditory distraction with earplugs or ‘white noise’. Use heavy curtains, blackout blinds, or even just an eye mask to help block out as much of the light as possible, since this is one of the most powerful sensory cues telling your brain it’s time to wake up. 21 The one other tip that has been documented to improve sleep recently is rocking, as in the children’s lullaby ‘Rock-a-bye baby’.
English ivy, for instance, helps to tackle airborne mould, eliminating most of it in a matter of just a few hours. Madagascan areca palm, then you might like to know that it came out top in terms of mopping up airborne pollutants.
Around 30 per cent of the population are night owls, 40 per cent are larks, and the rest fall somewhere in between. UK Biobank and the gene-testing site 23andMe assessed almost 680,000 people, 86,000 of whom had their sleep timing measured with an activity monitor. Using genome-wide data, 351 genetic loci associated with being a lark were identified.
‘new-car smell’ is almost always an artificial concoction from a fragrance lab. there are even annual lists of the best-smelling new cars. This car cologne, if you will, is sprayed into the cabin just before the car is returned to the customer. According to Hugh Hadland, Managing Director of S. C. Gordon Ltd, the coachbuilders of Rolls-Royce cars,
some models of the Volkswagen Golf have ‘soundaktors’ installed. These sound actuators help boost the roar of the engine. ‘sport’ mode then the engine will suddenly start to growl. Not only that, but the background lighting inside the car turns from white to bright red. Does something so simple really convince people that the car that they are driving is more powerful? sound that really can help to seal the deal.
dashboards sound just right when tapped. That, along with the sound of the horn, turns out to be a surprisingly important driver of car sales.
1932 book titled Consumer engineering was, ‘Make it snuggle in the palm.’
Talking on the phone while driving increases the risk of having an accident fourfold. This is roughly equivalent to what is seen as the drink/driving limit in many countries is reached. Hand-held or hands-free, the risks are roughly the same. it is the inability to divide attention effectively between eye and ear that is the fundamental issue.
The research shows that your risk of having an accident while texting at the wheel goes up by a staggering twenty-three times.
scent displays will one day be used to arouse dozy drivers rather than the loud and unpleasant auditory alerts we came across earlier. Pumping out an arousing ambient scent such as cinnamon, peppermint, rosemary, eucalyptus or lemon
Stimulating two senses is normally better than stimulating one
The Japanese have a word for those who literally work themselves to death– karoshi. So serious is the problem that in 2018 the government there was forced to introduce legislation limiting the amount of overtime that workers are allowed to perform – no more than 100 hours in a single month, and a maximum of 720 hours in a year.
Harvard Business Review, 62 per cent of high-earning individuals work more than 50 hours a week, 35 per cent work more than 60 hours a week and 10 per cent work more than 80 hours.
John Pencavel from Stanford University, is that analysis of female munitions workers pulling 70-hour weeks during the First World War (this a classic study in the field) revealed that they did not get much more done than those working just 56 hours.
Tiffany Field and her colleagues in Florida showing that a fifteen-minute massage at lunchtime enhances people’s concentration in the afternoon.
Josiah Wedgwood, the eighteenth-century British industrialist, has been credited with the idea of keeping the workplace clean. He is probably the one you should blame for the now widespread ‘lean’ approach to office design.
Emma, the office worker of the future. Red eyes, hunched back, headaches and a host of other health problems.
The difference in thermal comfort between the sexes is not small either. According to one study, the most striking difference is between European and North American men and Japanese women, who prefer an ambient temperature that is an average of 3.1°C (5.6°F) higher than the 22.1°C (71.8°F) preferred by the Western men.
men typically have more heat-producing muscle mass than women, and so their metabolic rates are much higher (up to 30 per cent faster, in fact). Unfortunately for female office workers, the building guidelines that were established some decades ago were based on what would make an elevenstone forty-year-old man maximally comfortable, thermally speaking.
Given that the battle for the thermostat is unlikely to go away any time soon. temperature-controlled seats, as already found in many high-end cars.
When was the last time you felt sleepy at work?
journal Sleep in 2006 stated that a dose of bright afternoon light (something you might equally well get from a special lamp as from the great outdoors, assuming that the sun is shining) helps tackle sleepiness after lunch. 19 Meanwhile, playing background music has been shown to help reduce boredom and improve the productivity of factory workers and typists by as much as 1020 per cent.
biggest problems with open-plan offices, though, is noise, especially from other people’s conversations.
Something that I like to do is to place a natural object on my desk – a stone, a pine cone, a chestnut or a piece of tree bark; something with a natural feel to contrast with all the artificially smooth surfaces that fill my office environment.
Dutch researchers documented a 15 per cent increase in sales when they diffused a synthetic melon scent through a supermarket.
chocolate is one of the world’s most desirable aromas. Coffee is another of the world’s most-liked aromas.
coffee sales at the service station can be more than tripled simply by spritzing drivers with the synthetic aroma of freshly ground coffee while they are filling up at the pumps out on the forecourt.
Intelligent scent dispensers
olfactory marketing campaign
The piece warned commuters, especially those on the Underground, to be extremely cautious should they smell almonds, since cyanide is made from almonds, just like the drink! How unlucky can you be?
London-based marketing agencies that I worked with a few years ago decided to send a taxi around the capital’s streets pumping out the smell of McCain’s Ready Baked potatoes. There were even a few 3D video signs
shoppers were shown to spend 38 per cent more when slow as opposed to fast music was played (60 vs 108 bpm)
According to a report that appeared in Businessweek magazine, Chipotle carefully controls the tempo of the music that is beamed out to all 1,500 of its stores: they deliberately play faster music at busy times of day
‘critter brands’ – those wines that display a recognizable critter on their label: a giraffe, an emu, a toad, or what have you. While the critters may not have anything to do with the wine itself, the idea is that their presence on the label helps the confused shopper to remember, and hence to find once again, the bottle that they enjoyed so much last time. At least they can avoid asking for a tongue-twisting bottle of Eitelsbacher Karthäuserhofberg Riesling Kabinett
In 2017, Debra Zellner and her colleagues from Montclair State University, New Jersey, found that playing some flamenco in a North American university canteen led to increased sales of paella while playing Italian music led to increased sales of chicken Parmesan. We also tend to spend more on wine or a meal out when classical music is playing rather than other styles such as pop.
signs in a shop saying ‘Touch me’
MacBook Pro screens in the Apple store are tilted at exactly the same angle (70°, should you want to know)? This is far from the best viewing angle, so why, I ask you, would they do that? According to one commentator, it is so that shoppers will be tempted to adjust the screen in order to see better.
Bertil Hultén has shown that the probability of shoppers touching the glassware in an IKEA store can be increased simply by turning the ambient lighting down, 43 and a dramatic increase in sales of those products (65 per cent) was reported when also adding a pleasant vanilla fragrance. (This figure is based on a sample of around 900 shoppers with sales monitored over two successive weekends.
the chances are that it had already been fondled by an average of six shoppers before you finally put it into your basket. when researchers swabbed the screens at eight different UK branches of McDonald’s they found faecal matter
slow-tempo music would have relaxed the shoppers while the citrus scent may well have aroused them. 51 As such, combining an arousing scent with relaxing music may have left shoppers confused.
selling us these pipe dreams
‘What does $20 million burning smell like? Just ask DigiScents!
British Medical Journal, music, most often classical, can be heard somewhere between 62 and 72 per cent of the time in surgery.
improved performance when tackling a stressful lab task if they were allowed to listen to their preferred choice of music rather than working in silence or being forced to listen to the music provided by the experimenters.
Many people exhibit elevated blood pressure in a medical setting, something known as ‘white-coat hypertension’. Intriguingly, this phenomenon can be reduced simply by mounting landscape photographs on the walls of the examination room.
You might also want to take your date to a thriller movie next time you have ulterior motives for wanting to visit a cinema.
If I could take your face and average the two sides, making you look a little more symmetrical in the process, you would be rated as more attractive by others
Another way to gain a competitive advantage in the mating game is to play the guitar. In one small online study the likelihood that female students would respond to a Facebook friendship request from a young man increased when he was pictured holding said instrument.
women tend to be less interested in looks and rather prioritize the smell and sound of potential mates.
obvious, being rich appears not to harm a man’s reproductive chances either.
the ratio of the second to the fourth finger, what is known as the 2D:4D digit ratio, ought to be sexy too, especially when the ratio is low.
orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that responds to the attractiveness of male faces.
scent can sometimes actually be more effective when it is presented just below the threshold for awareness
‘Women across the world expend a great deal of time, energy, and money choosing clothes, accessories, and shades of make-up that enhance their attractiveness.’
So, next time you upload some pictures onto that dating site, make sure to smile while looking directly into the camera. Holding a guitar probably won’t harm your chances either. I’d also recommend getting the pictures you upload peer reviewed, while thinking carefully about how much red you show. And as soon as you get the chance, make sure to spray some pleasant fragrance into the air.
September 24, 2025
3.5
Informative and interesting enough without getting too deep. Definitely something in there for everyone to take away. I just don't know that I felt it was enough of a "Hack" of the senses. I think I wanted more practical uses, maybe a bit of a "how to" element eg. using the same perfume when revising and then wearing it in an exam- I used that hack in highschool and it works! At least now I have a better idea as to why
Informative and interesting enough without getting too deep. Definitely something in there for everyone to take away. I just don't know that I felt it was enough of a "Hack" of the senses. I think I wanted more practical uses, maybe a bit of a "how to" element eg. using the same perfume when revising and then wearing it in an exam- I used that hack in highschool and it works! At least now I have a better idea as to why
April 10, 2025
This is a very interesting and easily digestible review of the science behind how our senses and our behaviour and psychology are linked. Spence does a good job of looking at various experiments, and identifying their flaws.
However, it has its limitations. Many of the investigations discussed used such small sample sizes, Spence questioned them. Enough to question whether it is appropriate to collect them all in a book. Ones that are supported could be considered fairly obvious already, even if the science behind them wasn’t obvious. Finally, the senses tend to be treated separately throughout rather than holistically despite the author’s argument that the latter should be the approach.
However, it has its limitations. Many of the investigations discussed used such small sample sizes, Spence questioned them. Enough to question whether it is appropriate to collect them all in a book. Ones that are supported could be considered fairly obvious already, even if the science behind them wasn’t obvious. Finally, the senses tend to be treated separately throughout rather than holistically despite the author’s argument that the latter should be the approach.
December 23, 2022
I am intrigued to know just how much we sense and this book will certainly help you to understand what all your senses are doing, not just your eyes and ears. If you want a quick and easy few pages that give you the basics, read the final chapter and don't worry about the rest. If you are keen to know about the trials and tests that took place with all the facts, read this book in its entirety. It's disappointing to have read the entire book only to discover what I actually wanted was right at the back!
January 30, 2021
honestly, I don't know what I expected from a book with a borderline sensationalist title, but I did hope for a serious dive into research on perception.
I guess I wanted the author to take me seriously.
instead, the author told me about bacon alarm clocks and wellbeing-optimising colours of paint, with opinions at points overpowering the (at points questionable) research presented.
the book is structured nicely though, so here is that.
I guess I wanted the author to take me seriously.
instead, the author told me about bacon alarm clocks and wellbeing-optimising colours of paint, with opinions at points overpowering the (at points questionable) research presented.
the book is structured nicely though, so here is that.
December 27, 2021
Fascinating!
Truly eye-opening information from research. There is still so much we can learn about ourselves as human beings. I learned so much from reading this book, but the statistics and results for studies got a bit too much in certain parts (I understand that they were necessary to prove the author’s point). Overall, a fun, fascinating, and worthwhile read!
Truly eye-opening information from research. There is still so much we can learn about ourselves as human beings. I learned so much from reading this book, but the statistics and results for studies got a bit too much in certain parts (I understand that they were necessary to prove the author’s point). Overall, a fun, fascinating, and worthwhile read!
January 29, 2023
A business/marketing book in disguise? This felt “addy” to me so I tuned out. Ad people love quirks of perception like “towels that smell nice feel softer” because most of advertising is finding a way to persuade you to buy a commodity product. Using smell and sound to manipulate is no different than ad men using words and images to illicit emotion. :(
March 15, 2022
The author claimed that many researches cited in the book have very small sample size, then why even use them in the book? Tip: just read the appendix (which is a good summary of some points) and read the parts accordingly if you are interested.
April 2, 2021
This book is easy to read but is too generic. The info is mostly on an introductory level so I skim read the last 2/3 of it .
August 23, 2022
Come to your senses and read this, then apply it vigorously! Untapped opportunity awaits.
February 20, 2024
Kitap iyiydi, kötüydü, akıcıydı, değildi, galiba (umarım) bu kitap sayesinde okumaya geri döndüm.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews