Sensehacking: How to Use the Power of Your Senses for Happier, Healthier Living

Instead, we will probably see much more of synaesthetic marketing (as in the Guinness example just mentioned), as well as possibly the delivery of some more extraordinary experiences, as we will see with our final example.

Stimulating the skin, or rather the C-tactile afferents, in other words, should perhaps be considered a biological necessity, and not merely a luxury for those wanting to be pampered.

We can even sniff out the likely quality of another person’s dance moves. In fact, those whose odour we like tend also to display bodily movements that we find attractive.

The optimal angle between the lower back and the buttocks is apparently somewhere around 45.5 degrees. This is supposedly so attractive to the male of the species because it mimics lordosis, the stereotypical posture seen in many species indicating sexual proceptivity.

Whatever the cause, the novelist John Updike would seem to have perfectly captured the importance of this cue in his work Pigeon feathers and other stories when he wrote, ‘A woman’s beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic s

Ultimately, sensism is all about finding the right balance of sensory stimulation in our lives. We need to recognize that the sensory overload so many of us complain about is really only affecting our higher rational senses, namely our eyes and ears. As we have seen, too many of us are suffering from a neglect of our more emotional senses – namely

You can think of it as ‘sensory nudging’, at least when the goal of sensehacking is societal good.21

Moon Ribas has a seismic sense. An implant in her arm allows her to feel the earth’s seismic activity, with a sensor in her elbow vibrating every time an earthquake occurs anywhere on the planet.38 And there is also Neil Harbisson, a British artist who grew up in Catalonia and was born with achromatopsia, a severe form of colour blindness. He calls

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.

While some researchers have wanted to explain vision’s dominance in purely mathematical (specifically Bayesian) terms, there remains some intriguing evidence suggesting that there is a more deep-seated reliance on, or attention to, whatever is before our eyes, that the mathematicians have not yet been able to explain.30 This is where the anthropolo