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

Implicit in their attitude was the traditional view of perception, whereby the senses were considered as entirely separate systems. This is, after all, just how they appear to us on the outside: we have eyes to see, ears to hear, a nose to smell, a tongue with which to taste, and skin to feel the world around us.

While an evolutionary account of the nature effect (stress recovery theory) is often put forward, it is worth noting that an alternative account in terms of perceptual fluency might well be as plausible. The idea here is that we find it especially easy to process natural scenes because their fractal arrangement matches the statistics that our visua

We should, I think, be questioning the dominance, or hegemony of the visual in contemporary society. We should all be asking whether this particular hierarchy of the senses that we find ourselves with currently is the right one, be it for ourselves or for the societies in which we live. Looking across cultures and history, one finds that there are

It does not stop there, though, for one group of Italian psychologists reported that the size of the object we associate with a specific odour can influence our reaching behaviour too. They found that when we smell something small – think of a clove of garlic or a pistachio nut – then our motor system is automatically primed to pick up a small obje

This is an example of what Louis Cheskin referred to as ‘sensation transference’. The idea here is that the sensations we associate with what we feel seem to carry over to our experience of, and liking for, other product attributes as well. So, given that we all intuitively tend to associate weight with quality, we automatically believe that those

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

Since the end of the Second World War there has probably been more research into hacking the driver’s senses to provide the optimal multisensory experience while at the wheel than in any other environment. In no other field has sensehacking been turned into such a fine art, or, rather, science.

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.

you might well be a ‘sensory junkie’. This is a term used to describe those shoppers who crave multisensory stimulation.