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

The best road between A and B is the road that is economical, safe and interesting. It has been estimated that sixty-five per cent of highway traffic is for pleasure, and pleasure comes from variety.

superadditivity. This is the idea that individually weak sensory inputs may sometimes combine to give rise to a multisensory experience that is much richer than would be predicted simply by the sum of the individual parts.

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

Much of the interest in the nature effect has been triggered by the eminent North American sociobiologist E. O. Wilson’s influential suggestion that we humans are biophilic, meaning that we have a natural affinity for living things.

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.

But what of the natural rhythms of the other senses? I, for one, often wonder about the dawn chorus, especially when the birds start chirping and tweeting at 4.30 a.m. as it gets light in the summertime. It certainly feels like that racket coming from the large tree outside my bedroom window is having much the same effect on my alertness and arousa

By contrast, for women, a potential mate’s natural scent is the single most important sensory cue to his immunological profile, informing her probably subconscious assessment of offspring viability.

Nevertheless, the latest developments in social, cognitive and affective neuroscience are increasingly highlighting the profoundly beneficial effects of stroking the skin.