Enhancing Multisensory Experiences: Perspectives from the Food & Beverage, and Flavor & Fragrance Industries

This is episode #14 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 24th of March, 2022. 

My guest today is professor Charles Spence, a world-famous experimental psychologist with a specialization in neuroscience-inspired multisensory design. He has worked with many of the world’s largest companies across the globe since establishing the Crossmodal Research Laboratory (CRL) at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University in 1997. Prof. Spence has published over 1,000 academic articles and edited or authored, 15 books (a sample is provided in the Notes). His work focuses on the design of enhanced multisensory food and drink experiences, through collaborations with chefs, baristas, mixologists, chocolatiers, perfumiers, and the food and beverage, and flavour and fragrance industries. Prof. Spence has worked extensively in the world of multisensory experiential wine and coffee and has also worked extensively on the question of how technology will transform our dining/drinking experiences in the future.

We started the discussion addressing how many senses do humans have, after which we jumped right into important questions related to sense harmony, sensory overload, sense congruency, dominance, and harmony. 

The second part of the discussion moved toward technology (as I usually like to do), brainstorming about how can we use the senses to provide the best immersive experience in augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. Here is the show.

Show Notes:

- How many senses do humans have and use
- Sensory dominance: Are vision and hearing our most important and most complex senses?
- Looking at sensory combinations
- How do senses interact?
- How much do we know about individual differences in somatosensory stimulation and perception?
- Considering cross-modal brain plasticity
- The role of technology (i.e., AI / AR / VR) in shaping our awareness and use of the senses
- Ethical implications

Note:

Links to some of Dr. Spence’s more recent (and popular) books:

1) Spence, Charles. 2017. Gastrophysics: The new science of eating. Penguin Viking.  
[International bestseller; winner of the 2019 Le Grand Prix de la Culture Gastronomique from Académie Internationale de la Gastronomie. ]

2) Spence, Charles. 2021. Sensehacking - How to Use the Power of Your Senses for Happier, Healthier Living. Penguin UK.