full interview_charles spence_7.mp3
Charles Spence [00:00:00] My name is Charles Spence. I'm a gastrophysicist.
Speaker 2 [00:00:03] What does a gastropitheca do?
Charles Spence [00:00:06] Gastrophysicist is someone who's interested in food. Nice food experiences, so the gastro of gastronomy. But it's coming at it from a sort of psychological side. I'm an experimental psychologist by training. From the field of psychophysics where we try and understand what is it about sensation and perception that leads us to respond in quite the way that we do.
Speaker 2 [00:00:28] What is the fundamental insight of your profession?
Charles Spence [00:00:35] I think one of the key things that studying gastropysics tells you is that the pleasures of the table reside in the mind up here, not in the mouth because it's in our minds, in our brains where the sight of food, the sound of its making, the taste, the aroma, the texture all to come together along with nostalgia and memories and storytelling and emotion to kind of deliver the food experiences. Our brains do this wonderful job of convincing us. I'm tasting it right in here. It tastes just this way when in fact all the hard work's being done up here when the senses combine with everything
Speaker 2 [00:01:14] Give me an example of how that might work.
Charles Spence [00:01:17] So one of my favorite examples of the pleasure of the table being in the mind, not in the mouth, comes from a dish, you have to imagine being served a dish which is a kind of pink ice cream, looks like an ice cream. Most of us in the West will assume that that's probably gonna be raspberry, strawberry ice cream so probably sweet, delicious, maybe not so healthy. Then we taste that dish, it turns out to be salty. Not as you expected. And in fact it tastes really salty. So whoever's been in the kitchen's really overdone it. And this dish is in fact frozen crab bisque or smoked salmon ice cream. So the color of the pink is perfect for either of those things, it's just not what we expect. And if we go into a tasting experience expecting one thing and tasting another, that can lead to this disconfirmation of expectation. And when it's in our mouth and it could poison us, something we didn't expect to taste. Then that leads to this kind of a rebound so it tastes much saltier than it actually did. There was this dish that one of the world's top chefs here in England, Heston Blumenthal, served to his favorite guest before it went on the menu. He thought it was perfectly seasoned and he was about to be crowned the world s best chef. His diners in his restaurant, his regulars, thought it was overly seasoned and the answer turns out to be how you describe, how you name the dish, not just thinking about the ingredients and the preparation.
Speaker 2 [00:02:44] No, it's not about what I put in my mouth, specifically.
Charles Spence [00:02:50] I think one of my favorite quotes is the idea that eating is a very dangerous thing that we do. We put stuff in our mouths, we don't know what it is or where it came from. It may poison us, so we need to think carefully about it and a lot of brain evolution has been around trying to detect where the energy density foods are in the environment and then paying attention to them and then hopefully eating them thereafter. So our brains kind of evolved to predict the energy density of food and to decide what's delicious or delightful or preferably what just has lots of energy in it or other nutrients that we need and to avoid the stuff that is potentially poisonous and might kill us and all those predictions about what things might taste like based on what we've tasted in the past that looks like this and I remember one last time I had it all that's going on in the brain to try and decide not to not to make mistakes when it comes to putting things in your math.
Speaker 2 [00:03:45] How does that play out in terms of spreading across the globe culturally? You gave me an evolutionary reason, so how does that play out an actual culture?
Charles Spence [00:03:57] So, I think eating and nutrition has been fundamental to survival no matter where you are in the world and no matter when you were living, but clearly cultures play a role in what we end up consuming today. And I think there are a number of drivers for that. One of the ones that I'm most fascinated around currently is the role of herbs and spices and blending of flavors and how that varies across geographical regions. I love chili. My wife doesn't, others don't, some do. And if you, in some countries in the world, in some cuisines in the word, chili is a much more common ingredient. So what's it doing there? Why do we add herbs and spice to our food when they don't really have much nutritional content? They're not really filling in any way, shape, or form. And all cultures seem to have their own particular peculiar combination of spices and herbs. And some really nice research has been shown that if you correlate a country's average annual temperature with the number of herbs and spices that it combines in its cuisine, then the hotter the ambient temperature, the annual temperature, the more spices you find. So if you take somewhere like Norway, which I think has one of the lowest. Annual average temperatures of something like 1.9 degrees celsius, then they have an average of about 1.8 herbs or spices in a dish. Move to India or to Thailand, and they have average temperatures of around 40 degrees centigrade, and there you're seeing around 10 herbs or spices a dish, so in this sense, geography and the culture that's really built around geographical regions is constraining what we consume. Because those herbs and spices, what they're actually doing is helping to kill microbes. So think about a time pre-refrigeration and you don't want to eat something that's poisonous. You don't wanna the microbes to be growing. And the best way to prevent that pre- refrigeration is through the addition of herbs and spice. And you can see how chili, garlic and many of these other things that have become central to our cuisines now are determined by where we live or where that food culture developed.
Speaker 2 [00:06:14] You said it again because you said ambient, and I think you meant to say something else. So just repeat that part about how the temperature relates to...
Charles Spence [00:06:22] So if you take countries that have a very high average annual temperature, like Thailand or India, at around 39, 40 degrees centigrade, then you find that the foods, the recipes in those countries have a far higher preponderance of herbs and spices, chili and other spices, than countries like Norway, which has the lowest average annual temperatures of any at about 1.9, 2.3 degrees centigrade. There they have less than two, an average of two herbs or spices per dish. This is supporting the idea that what herbs and spices are doing in our cuisine is actually originally helping to serve an antimicrobial function and the hotter the country the more likely you are to have spoilage in food and if you then compare sort of meat dishes versus vegetable dishes again you're likely to have spoilage and have bad microbes in meat-based dishes. And hence you also find that there are more herbs and spices typically in those meat-based dishes than there are in vegetarian ones.
Speaker 2 [00:07:26] You talked about the brain putting together all these different inputs when people eat. What does that say about the senses? Because taste is supposed to be one of the five senses.
Charles Spence [00:07:40] So I think all of us believe that we taste in our mouth, that's what it feels like, the food that we put in, the drink that we've put in there, and we can all taste the flavor as it were. Kind of a conflict in a way between the way we on an everyday basis talk about taste and the way that the scientists or the gastrophysicists talks about taste. In everyday life we say I love the taste of this, I don't like the taste of that, but what we mean is not literally just what we're picking up on our tongue, which might be technically scientifically gustation, the sense of taste, which would only be sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami as a sort of serious fifth taste. But what most of us really enjoy and like or dislike in food, what we call the taste, is actually the flavor. And that involves also the retronasal smell as we're chewing and munching and swallowing. Volatile, rich air in our oral cavity has been pushed out to the back of the nose in the opposite direction to when we normally sniff food. And it's that retronazal smell that carries the meaty, the herbal, the citrus, the burnt, the fruity, the floral, all the things it might like. Flavors really the 75 to 95 percent of what we think we're tasting is actually this retronasal smell and yet our brain does this amazing job of convincing us no we're not tasting the citrus in our nose we taste it in our mouth and the food or the drink that's in the air so our brain is all the time kind of gluing together what's been picked up from the taste buds on the tongue the basic taste of sweet bit of salty sour and umami combining it with the aromas and the volatile as we get pushed out from the of the nose, gluing it together and then converging it. Kind of almost like a ventriloquism effect, convincing each and every one of us that what we taste originated in the food and math, which in a way it did, but to detect it we had to use some other receptors along the way.
Speaker 2 [00:09:34] You've also talked about how the sentences aren't as separate as we make them.
Charles Spence [00:09:41] When we look at ourselves from the outside, we have separate sense organs. I have my eyes to see, my ears to hear, my nose to smell, my mouth to taste, my skin to feel. And even when you go to the first stages in the brain, one finds that the visual information is projected initially to the visual cortex at the back of the brain. The auditory cortex picks up and processes initially what you hear and so on for each sense of the separate part of the brain dedicated to each sense organ. But the more closely you look, the more you find that in fact the senses are intimately and always very often automatically talking to one another such that you know what we think we are hearing is very often determined by what we are seeing what we're tasting may be changed by what we hear by what we see and some of our sort of favorite experiments about the sort of multi-sensory connections in the world of food and drink we take things like white wine and miscolor it so looks like a rosé wine or a red wine. We can convince many of the world's best experts to suddenly smell things that aren't in the glass, that they never said were there when they knew it was a white wine, but when they're misled by their eyes because of these multi-sensory or cross-s sensory connections, they taste what they see, sometimes you taste what you hear, and I think there's probably nothing more multi- retronasal smell. But also the sounds of crunch, and crackle, and crispy, squeaky, but also those sounds. But also textures, and mouth feels. All the senses are combined to deliver those flavor experiences that ultimately then localize this taste like strawberry ice cream, whatever it might be in my mouth.
Speaker 2 [00:11:26] So, as you know, we filmed this Indian meal, the thali, which really is, it seems to work on many levels for a bunch of different senses. You know what it looks like, you know what is tastes like, so what's going on? Why does thali exist all across India and so, you now, such a touchstone of a culture.
Charles Spence [00:11:50] I probably haven't had a tali for 35 years since last time I was in India, not very popular in Indian restaurants in the UK, but what I remember and what I've seen since is a very interesting dish to me now as a gastrophysicist, in part because the elements are separated. You may have six different dishes around, a central bit of rice or bread, and each those elements. Are a different color, different texture, different taste, in fact. What some confusingly call different flavors. When I was looking it up, it says, you know, there should be a sweet element, a saltiest, sour, a bitter, but also an astringent and a spicy. These are the sort of six key elements that should be exemplified by each of those small dishes. I'm very interested to think about whether each of those tastes or mouthfeels have a particular color or how does somebody know when they're presented with one of these meals which one is which, where should I start, does it matter the order, does it matter how I combine them, am I allowed in a way to sort of create flavors for myself by picking a bit of this and a bit that. So it takes that element of... Of flavor development or almost an exploration to the diner and takes it out of the hands of the chef who just prepares the constituent parts. I'm also very interested by the fact that this is served on a round tray with each of the bowls being round themselves. So we do a lot of work around the shape of plateware and probably I presume this dish is very often, this meal is very much eaten by the hands. Again it's a very kind of experience. Often times these bowls are metal, so it's got a particular sound, a particular thermal qualities. So I think there's a lot to explore there in terms of this combination of tastes and the way it varies and gets owned in different parts of India and thereafter around the world exported. I think is there a prototypical, what is the? The pure, is there such a thing? And how, how does this... Now I think today why is there not an umami? Bitter, sweet, salty, sour, astringent and spicy. Why isn't there also an umami sort of proteinaceous given that's how popular taste is in many parts of the world.
Speaker 2 [00:14:35] Okay, so that was great. Now, there's something for us kind of fascinating by the culture came up with us and like, you know, the great grandma, everyone talks about their grandmother's tallies, those tallies. Well, the grandmas who may be, you, know, not able to read or write and certainly not necessarily do math, you now, have been able to figure out all these different complicated flavors that are so satisfying. No scientist ever told them. How to do this. No one decides, oh you need to balance this with this, or this is going to give you this crunch. What's that kind of process, that kind of cultural absorption?
Charles Spence [00:15:19] Someone thinks about such a dish that's steeped in culture and in tradition. This isn't something that is created anew, this isn't molecular gastronomy, this is not something out of the ordinary. I suppose how do people know what should be on that plate? Well, from tradition, from their parents, what they experienced as a child, maybe what their grandmother made or what they've experienced in restaurants. And this notion of the separate elements. I mean, so much of Western cuisine, it might be around trying to harmonize flavors, trying to bring things together in a dish. Whereas here, we're almost sort of separating out the elements. And that perhaps speaks to a very different mindset in the East and the West around the combination of flavors. There's been sort of some great big data analyzes of all the online recipes you can find from different cultures and cuisines. And if you sort of take those recipes online with a sort of chemistry atlas of the different volatiles and components in a carrot, whatever else it might be, then you can say, okay, in this recipe, the ingredients that are put together, the six or seven or 10 ingredients, they seem to share something more often than you might expect by chance. Or. It seems strange, but these ingredients have been picked, it seems, so that they don't share any of their flavor volatiles. And what's really interesting and has come out of this big data research is the fact that in Europe, North America, recipes seem to combine ingredients that do share volatils. Whereas in India and some other parts of Asia, those recipes tend to pick ingredients that do not share anything. And so this is like a cultural difference. The origins of which some would put down to whether it's wheat or rice farming. And maybe there's an element of this in this entirely dish where this is not something that's all brought together to harmonize as one flavor where everything's combined and harmonizes or matches, but instead it's pulled apart and separated, segregated on the basis of these basic taste qualities and why. In India it should be those six qualities that are judged as primary. I don't know for sure but if you go back far enough in history and religion you might find some explanation.
Speaker 2 [00:17:57] Yeah, there aren't, I know they talk about Ayurvedic influence and things like that. Harmony. What does harmony mean to you?
Charles Spence [00:18:06] Harmony, I think, is something that sounds appealing to many. We like music that is harmonious. Many chefs and critics talk about dishes that have a harmonious flavor or where the food and the wine choice are paired such as to deliver a harmony. So it's some sort of combination of elements that combine well together. Without necessarily losing their component parts, it's not just a mixture, it's something new, the individual parts retain their individuality and yet they speak to each other in some fundamentally pleasing way. And I think harmony. It's sometimes hard to know whether the term originated in hearing and when a chef talks about harmonious flavors, it's sometimes harder to know if that's more than merely metaphor whether you can experience harmony outside of hearing and or between other senses. But I think it's used in regular speak as a pleasant sensation where the elements Come together and speak to each other in a way. It's pleasing
Speaker 2 [00:19:26] You sound like a bit of skeptical about the word.
Charles Spence [00:19:32] So, we just published a paper on harmony, asking this very question about harmony outside of hearing, and I am skeptical about lots of things. One of the ones is harmony, but I think it is merely metaphorical outside hearing, and yet at the same time I do see how it is a term, an auditory term, like many like, you know, sort of chords, harmonies, high notes, low notes. That may have originated in music, but which are so commonly used when we talk about flavors and aromas and perfumes. So I think there's something interesting to probe there. Why is it that these terms, harmony, high, low, chords, translate from hearing to taste and flavor when other terms, we don't choose to describe flavors necessarily in terms of colors. We use auditory notation. Is it because... Sounds like tastes are kind of temporary, they come and they go, or is there some other deeper affinity between the senses that this shared language speaks to?
Speaker 2 [00:20:42] Well, harmony could also be like architecture, right? You could go to, you know, England's full of buildings that have a harmonious aspect to them, you now? So it just, because it's an idea we've played around with as an organizing principle for some of our material in the, I mean, the question of whether there is a kind of a natural human need or desire for things to be in harmony. That if it's this harmonious, that it just put people on edge. Whatever it is, whether it's taste, whether it's music that's dissonant. You know, whether it's buildings that are all crazy. And I'm just wondering whether you think that that is a thing or whether it is, as you say, just a kind of a shortcut that we use to talk to each other.
Charles Spence [00:21:25] I think the notion of harmony clearly resonates with people when they use the term, you don't see it as a scratching your head thing, I don't know what they're talking about, it sort of makes sense to you intuitively but when you probe it in more details it's hard to know what fundamentally that, calling it harmonious rather than just pleasing or similar, gives you. I think in the world of hearing there is a sense that it's kind of an evolutionary argument about less harmonious sounds which might be sort Ruffer. Sounds are associated with you know danger and threat and screams and cries and so we're sort of you know pushed away from those unharmonious sounds because of their association with threat and danger towards these more harmonious ones that I guess will tend to be generated under conditions that are more positive or beneficial.
Speaker 2 [00:22:26] You're somebody who deals with data. You look at the data a lot. And I assume you look at it and say, we can do things better, or we can do things differently, or you can cause people to behave in different ways based on what we've learned from the data. Is there a limit to that? Like, you talked about the thing that looked like ice cream that was actually frozen bisque. That does not appear to have taken the world by storm. I mean, is that sort of basically running into, like, the data might be there and it's perfectly reasonable to serve it this way, but people just ain't gonna go for it.
Charles Spence [00:23:11] So as a psychologist, we do a lot of experiments to try and understand what things go together, what influences what. So I'm not a chef, I don't create recipes, but I'm really interested in everything else that surrounds that experience and try to study scientifically with measures, get people to rate, how much did you enjoy that dish from that plate? When this music was playing, when you were sitting on that kind of chair from sort of table when I describe the dish in this way. How do all these other various product extraneous factors influence the tasting experience? That generates lots of data. But I'm not a creative, I can't create food, I'm no musical, I am not a designer. But we're lucky enough to sort of take that data, try and extract the commonalities across people. Often in these sort of surprising connections between senses that maybe sweet is high them effort. Pass those sort of insights data driven insights on to creatives who might be composers or chefs or or chefs and composers working together To try and create a new kind of experience That will speak to people or offer them the opportunity to find new connections between their senses Of course, I'm based in Oxford and many of the people that we test so many of my psychological colleagues are called weirdos. The sort of western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic boys and girls studying psychology. It's kind of a frighteningly high proportion of all the research data we get comes from there. And yet we do try wherever possible to go cross-culturally and say, does this music that we think sounds and makes things actually taste sweeter? We developed that in England or in North America. Will it work in India? And in some of our research we have been taking, so the sonic seasoning. Based on the data collection in Oxford to India and other parts of the world to show that, yes, they can decode the meaning, as it were, of the music in much the same way as our audiences at home. Beyond that, I do think there must be, there are clearly some cultural differences, but my way of thinking about it is that probably, no matter who we are, no matter where in the world we're born, all of our brains combine the senses. All of our brain, if we have the five basic senses, all of our brains will be visually dominant. That's just kind of hardwired in. So there's going to be no cultural variation there. But where you might find the cultural variation, and we do find the cultural variation might be in terms of which color in particular. Is associated with sweetness, say. And in some of our latest research, we've been looking at the color, particularly of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. And we find that with Western audiences, it's like pink and red are very strongly associated with expectations of sweetness. Whereas some of the data that's coming out from Taiwan, from India, and other tropical, subtropical zones, is suggesting that maybe yellow goes with sweetness. For us in the West, yellow and green are the sour colors. So where's this coming from? And one suggestion may be again, it's sort of built into the culture and the sort of flora and fauna being different, that maybe if you were to go to India, to Taiwan and places, you'd find that a lot of the very sweet fruits, bananas, the pineapples, the mangoes, what do they share? They're all kind of an orange-ish yellow. And maybe the cultural variation is there in internalizing the particular statistics, even though... Whoever you are, wherever you are. If you change the color of a food or drink, that will impact you in some way or other.
Speaker 2 [00:27:04] One of the things you talked about, we saw online, you talked about coffee. It's a drink that's not universal, but pretty pretty widespread. So what happens when we when we consume coffee? What senses does it use? What are we responding?
Charles Spence [00:27:20] So I think the coffee drinking experience is highly multi-sensory, like any other food and drink experience. What maybe differentiates it from other food-and-drink experiences is the fact that it's one of the universally most liked aromas. Even amongst those who do not like to drink coffee itself, they very often appreciate the smell and the aroma. And for me, I think, you know, that coffee drinking experience, there is a black or a milky liquid in a cup, and most people sort of focus on the liquid itself, on how many volatile compounds it has, which may be 700 to a thousand, probably more volatile compounds in a cap of coffee than in a fancy glass of wine, in fact, it turns out. But they never really think about everything else that surrounds that liquid getting into somebody's mouth. For me I think a lot about the cup, why do we have different cups for different kinds of coffee, what color cup might work best, does the material of the cup does it's texture, does it shape, does it weight, does its size, how do they impact your expectations about coffee and its taste. I think about the sounds of present preparation, that if you go to a coffee shop there grinding and steam coming out and dripping into a coffee cup and we did a lot of research around how those sounds set expectations in the taster's mind even before they put anything to the lips and all that comes together with any cues we might have about the origin of the coffee beans, how they are roasted, are they single estate? Do they come out of the back side of whatever the animal is in Indonesia where some of the world's most expensive coffee not originates ends up coming out. How all these various factors play together to deliver an experience that is so widely shared. And for me, a very interesting… most things that we taste the way they smell, we sniff them in the kitchen or on the table, are exactly the same as the way the smell when we eat them. We're not surprised when we put something in our mouth. It always tastes as it smelt before we tasted it. There are a couple of exceptions. One is sort of smelly French cheeses that might smell disgusting, like sweaty socks, but when you put them in your mouth suddenly, oh it's magical, it's marvelous. And coffee, which we often hear people say, I love the smell of freshly ground coffee. Then you taste it and sometimes it's disappointing. Bitter and it's lost so where does that disconnect what's going on there to explain the difference and why is it i mean the biggest sin of all for me is if we have something that is one of the world's most preferred aromas or flavors of roast coffee why is it that so many of us every day drink cups of coffee for instance plastic or cardboard cups with a plastic lid on top that singularly stops us from being able to smell the thing that smells so great and only gives us a retronasal experience that is often disappointing and I think that sort of what to me seems like a sort of failure of design is built on the fact that we all intuitively think we taste in our mouths, we think it's happening, all the action is happening in here so as long as I get the liquid in there it doesn't matter quite how it got there and so I think there's a lot of scope for experimentation and exploration to take to think about how to optimize that coffee drinking experience. All the way from when you maybe first think about having a cup of coffee, which might not have been your, which you might think, you know, I decided I wanted a cup of coffee. Whereas if you analyzed it from the outside as a scientist what you might find in fact, well you just went into the train station or you went into the bookstore and there happened to be a coffee shop in there that was releasing the aroma and it was that aroma that almost triggered the desire in you to have this tasting experience.
Speaker 2 [00:31:27] I just need one, I need a sentence to set that whole thing up, okay? You were right in the middle of telling me, let's take coffee as an example. Just say a phrase like that. We just need kind of a topic sentence so we can add on.
Charles Spence [00:31:41] One of the foods of beverages that we've studied most extensively over the last decade or so is coffee. One of world's most complex flavors, but also one of the world's light aromas.
Speaker 2 [00:31:56] I have one more question, and then I'm going to let the other folks chime in. So, the series is about art and science coming together, okay? And then we say, oh, but we're doing a story about Kali, about Indian cooking. And they go, well, I don't quite see that. Do you see that? Does everybody sense?
Charles Spence [00:32:17] The question of why do a program about art and science entirely was one I was going to ask you. But since I saw in the script you had it down for me. I think there's a story to be told around any food. Where it came from, why it is the way it is, and how the aspects of the design that have been formalized over centuries or millennia, why are they that way? How could we? Do things differently. In my own work, working with chefs, we tend to be at more of the exploratory experimental end of things, more of a molecular gastronomy than tradition. But what I see when I look around the world is there's sort of a tension there between those countries and cultures, I think, that have a very strong food tradition. You might think of this dish sitting right in there as something that hasn't changed really for generations or millennia. I'm probably not open to a modernist twist, necessarily. And other food cultures, like in the UK and North America, where I see we're much more eclectic, much more open to absorbing. We don't have such a strong food culture ourselves, it feels, and hence we're more open to experimentation and innovation. And so I might say that perhaps the tali is a dish that initially at least you might think has this little scope for. I guess artistry going forward in terms of creativity and playing with the formula, but one that speaks to maybe the tradition of in the pre-scientific era, how were these dishes decided upon, why did anybody think they combined well, and that may be more of a matter of art than science.
Speaker 2 [00:34:08] And he's marrying.
Speaker 3 [00:34:13] Something beyond flavor sometimes, we talk about synesthesia, my wife says, didn't you hear that? And I say no I didn't hear that, I had my glasses on. You know what I mean? Is there something to that, beyond merely just flavor, but just kind of the way in which the senses combine to perceive anything?
Charles Spence [00:34:41] I think, no matter who we are, where we are born or brought up, our senses are combined in the brain, very often with vision dominating over the other senses, which might explain why people often do say that when they put their glasses on, they can hear better. That sort of makes no sense at all. Well, glasses don't have anything to do with your ears. And yet in the brains, these senses are combined and your brain is using those visual cues to help you understand and may give you as much as a 15 decibel. Increase in your ability to hear through combining the senses. In other situations you find that you may get a sort of super additive combination of sensory inputs. So my sort of favorite example comes from back in second world war days. In fact I have a colleague who's a flavor expert and he grew up when times were hard when there was no food and you had to reuse your chewing gum and again. So it's lost all its minty flavor. And the trick back then was just to roll it in a little bit of icing sugar, which has no smell, put it back in your mouth, and suddenly the mint flavor is there all over again. That's kind of a super additive combination of a faint taste and a very, very faint smell giving you something much bigger. On the flip side, when the senses combine in an incongruent manner, that's when you get kind of suppression instead. That's when you get the ice cream that looks one way, tastes different, you don't like the outcome. And you also see that people often talk about incongruency when they're watching a badly dubbed foreign movie. It might be George Clooney on the screen, he looks beautiful. You can sort of understand everything that's being said, but if the lips and the voice don't quite line up, your brain can't make sense of it. It's kind of incongerent and the overall experience will be rated as less pleasurable as a result.
Speaker 3 [00:36:30] Unless you're Italian, of course.
Charles Spence [00:36:32] Ha, ha, ha.
Speaker 4 [00:36:37] I'm trying to formulate this question. So the senses are combined in the brain. They are working together in various ways. Do different kinds of experiences cause the senses to realign? When I am standing in a museum and looking at a fabulous piece of art that I adore Are my senses aligned differently than they are when I'm making my coffee in the morning? Are all senses created equal in a sense?
Charles Spence [00:37:24] So we have multiple senses, at least the five. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Maybe also have a pheromonal sense and a sense of pain. This can go on and on, but we all agree on sort of five basic senses. One might wonder how do they combine? Are they on a sort of a level playing field or not? And the suggestion is that in fact our brain, more than half of our neocortex of our brain is given over to sight. Only 4 or 12% is given over to the sense of touch and hearing. When it comes to taste or smell, the figure is down at below 1% of the brain's neocortex given over those senses. So there's a huge sensory imbalance built in. And yet, at the same time... If you lose a sense, the sense that you do not want to lose is not vision. Well, I don't want to do that as well, but the sense you really don't want to loose is the sense of smell, because it turns out that people are more likely to commit suicide after a loss of their sense of smell than any other sense. So the kind of different metrics for how important each of our senses are, and maybe that might depend a bit on the kind context that we are in, the sort of the social and the emotional. Is maybe more easily conveyed through smell, whereas vision and hearing with much more rational senses instead. And when, you know, if we lose our sense of sight, many of us can still have mental imagery to imagine, remember what the person we can no longer see looks like, just from the sound of their voice. But for many people, when they lose their sense of smell, they don't have olfactory imagery. They can't imagine what somebody, their loved one smells like, what their favorite food tastes like anymore. And for that reason, along with the sort of close link to emotion, that people lead to a lot of depression and a lot of suicide.
Speaker 4 [00:39:22] Did you want to ask that normal question?
Speaker 2 [00:39:24] Yes, I'm just about to do that, thank you. Anticipation, that's an extra, extra time-based element here. How does anticipation work with the senses? It doesn't have to be food.
Charles Spence [00:39:38] We work a lot with food and the design of food experiences, but also other kinds of multi-sensory experience. But whatever sort of pleasure it might be, a nice meal, a good movie, a trip to the theater or to the art gallery, they really last more than a few hours in the moment. And I think that much more of our pleasure is actually related to the anticipation before we have that great meal, and the memory, the recollection, the sharing thereafter. So one might think, how then can we sort of optimize the anticipation of the experience? Because if that's a key part of the pleasure, it goes on for so much longer. How do we build up the excitement? How do get people almost imagining the taste or the experience in advance? And there are various sort of tricks and techniques out there. One of my favorite being from one restaurant that would send out a sort of a scent to the diners before they turned up at the restaurant. You'd get the scent again rubbed around the door frame and you walked in to the restaurant and they would send you home with a scented bag of sweets at which point you sort of realize, ah yes, that's the smell of a sweet shop. And that sort of triggers nostalgia, all sorts of positive emotions and they sort of used the scent there to extend a three hour dining experience to several weeks before, building up the anticipation till long after.
Speaker 2 [00:41:00] Can you speak to, I know this is totally off-piste, but, um, roller coasters. Okay. So the, the, the existential experience, the expectation, why people like roller costers? What, what's the, why is, I don't like them myself, why do people just love them?
Charles Spence [00:41:18] So recently, while a lot of the work has been around food, I actually come from a fairground family. So I've been becoming more and more interested in other kinds of pleasures and experiences you might only get at a fair ground or theme park. The roller coaster is one example of that. What I sort of call Approprioceptive Pleasure. It's sort of stimulating senses that other kinds experiences don't. Your sense of where your body is in space, how it is moving, your orientation in space. They're proprioceptive for stimulus systems. They are not stimulated in an art gallery. They're not stimulated in a restaurant or in a music concert. They're really stimulated so much with VR headsets either. It's only something, these bodily senses that you get stimulated on the, any of those fairground rides, be it a roller coaster or a whirlitzer or the cakewalk. That my grandparents grew up promoting. So you have to completely go to the playground of the rollercoaster to get these proprioceptive sensations, but why should I want them stimulated? I mean when you hear people screaming in terror, fainting, it doesn't seem like a necessarily a pleasurable experience and that so many love it. Maybe it's partly about you're giving ourselves sort of a fearful experience, taking ourselves to a kind of extreme. And in my readings around roller coaster rides, I've got this great quote, I forget from whom, who says, you don't need to be an engineer to be a designer rollercoasterer, you need to a psychologist. It's all about the anticipation, it's all the sounds of the screams are part of the total experience. I'm describing how there's something called the dog's tooth ratchet or something, that's when the rollercoater climbs up, you go kadoonk, kadooonk, and that's all there. It could be done silently, but no with a kadooonk. Add that auditory element and it helps to accentuate the experience. Along with the smell of the food, the smell of the fear, because we can smell fear of those sitting in the seats in front. And so I think many of these fairground rides are total experience. They do, again, engage, maybe not taste, but many of the senses in ways that are completely immersive. If you're on that roller coaster ride, you can't be anywhere else. You can't start thinking about what's for dinner. You're completely in the moment. You may hate being in the movement, but you can get away from it. So it is. For me, I think the total immersive experience, and maybe that comes from being uniquely linked to the bodily sense faces and that sort of sense of, I'm about to die. I know I'm not, but it feels like, I can't quite convince myself that I'm.
Speaker 2 [00:44:02] Yes, exactly. And the coaster designer, we filmed the coaster designer, one of the leading ones in the world, and they are very conscious of, can you hear the people screaming? Can you see it? You don't want to show them too much. You want to keep some of it mysterious. So the coaster we're doing, which will be at Parc Asterix in Paris, that he designed, you want to, the audience thinks that they're going on this one thing that they can see from where they're standing in line, but then when they're actually on it. There's something they didn't see. They didn't anticipate. It's kind of that one-two punch. As you say, it isn't just about going up and down, up and downhill.
Charles Spence [00:44:42] And probably one other thing I should mention about the roller coaster ride is it turns out there's a whole branch of psychology around dating and attraction, which again is multi-sensory like everything else, and it turns out that if you want to ask somebody out on a date, do so just after you've taken them on the rollercoaster ride, and they'll be so aroused, so fearful, and the associate that arousal with you, the person who's asking for the date, not necessarily with the thing that caused it, and you'd be more likely to succeed.
Speaker 2 [00:45:11] I need to see the citation, because maybe we'll go find that person and he or she can tell us about it. I guess it'll only be on a date. Right, then we'll just say will you marry me, right? You're a death after a date, sir. Okay, anything else?
Speaker 4 [00:45:28] Good. That's good. So that means my brain's going to be good. Well, have you worked around music at all, Charles? What happens to our brains on music, our emotions on music? Or is that out of your mind?
Charles Spence [00:45:50] No, it's also on pain and music, sonic seasoning and music. So I've done a lot of work on music and soundscapes and how they affect. On the one hand, thinking about how we can add, we can sonically season the food by picking these almost synesthetic sounds to match sweet tastes or bitter or salty or sour. We have spicy music. Sweet music is a high-pitched tinkling piano. Bitter music is very low-pitched. But also thinking about how music can be used to help alleviate pain. So I have a big project at the moment around music and noise in hospitals and for the elderly. And they're seeing all the evidence that has come out about how post-surgery patients can have their painkiller medications lowered if they listen to music, so that music can somehow have this sort of painkilling effect that is equivalent to some degree of pharmaceuticals.
Speaker 2 [00:46:57] Yes, that's one of the stories where we hope to follow up. Yeah, and of course, it's not just any music, right? You know, there's this whole question of like what music is it your favorite music?
Charles Spence [00:47:08] Death metal? Anyone?
Speaker 2 [00:47:11] He just had a serious operation. He loved listening to the death metal. No, no, no. No, it was rap, right? It was rap music. That was rap, right?
Speaker 3 [00:47:17] I like rap music, and I typically don't use rap music. I had a heart operation, and a friend of mine gave me her list and said, Hey, here, take this. And there's a bunch of other things. And for some reason, I still don't understand it, and that's something neuroscience about it. That music, I started to listen to it, and I completely got into it. That only was right there, and, I guess, it made me think about it...
Speaker 5 [00:47:40] Distraction as well, I guess distraction from um
Speaker 2 [00:47:46] No, it's interesting, and we spent some time with some doctors who do MRIs and they brought musicians in and they tried the musicians playing their own music versus other music and what people responded to and different parts of the brain light up and it's an endlessly detailed thing. What you do, what's a very core part of what you do is involving How do you change people's experiences in dining environments, the music, the shape of the glass, and all that. I could imagine somebody listening to that and saying, well, that's awfully manipulative.
Charles Spence [00:48:30] So I tell people about the work that we do with the chefs and the designers and musicians around kind of multi-sensor experiences, very often around the table, but not necessarily. Then the question that always sort of crops up at the end of the talk is, you know, isn't that manipulative? Oh, that's scary. That you can do that, that you can change people's tastes simply by changing the music, you can their choice of what they think they're ordering and why they think their it simply by flipping the audio or the or the lighting levels, and for me that's sort of a compliment in as much as it means that they're taking the science seriously, because I think back ten years ago when I was telling people about the power of the senses to affect behavior, mood, emotion and choice, they'd sort of go, nah, it doesn't feel like that to me, I don't believe you go away and they're daft, and now ten years later when people start to take the science serious they say yes, it is potentially scary, it could be used to you later. And probably everyone's got their own examples and maybe urban myths of of fast food chains doing this or that I mean color schemes that draw you in but then push you out somehow psychologically And while that does exist, for me the science of the senses and the connections between them that we are uncovering, that's just sort of scientific insight, it's neither good nor bad, just knowledge, and it can be used for either side, but in my last book Sense Hacking was all about trying to put this knowledge in each and every one of our hands to say if you at home want to make your food taste better, why not do this, if you want to eat less but don't feel hungry, do that, if want to attract a mate, then something else and if you're going to hospital then why don't you play this music, have this scent and so I think for each and every aspect of our daily lives we could think more carefully about the impact of the senses, how they connect and influence us. It's just for me that in the world of food and drink design it's much easier I found. Innovation happens much faster, creativity. If you can convince a chef of something interesting he or she may put it on the menu next week. There are their own bosses and they can try things out and make the science tasty. Whereas if you're working with a big organization, a corporate, where there's layers of management and it's gonna take years for it to get into the pipeline and so innovation happens much more slowly. But I believe anything and everything you can do to a plate of food or a glass of wine in terms of changing the experience, you could put a person in the place of the food, you can put a product and similar rules will apply and they can be used for good, for evil as it seems. But I'm really excited to think about the possibility. Taking the science and using it to help people eat less maybe through sonic sweeteners to help those in the care system in particular who are in very badly designed multi-sensory environments in hospitals very noisy when most hospital meals are not being returned to the kitchen uneaten so terrible sensory design can we redesign foods in order to fit the needs of those who are on chemotherapy or in hospital so that they are better fed, so that recover sooner and hopefully save money along the way.
Speaker 2 [00:51:38] What's your own creative journey? How did you get started? When you were little, were you mixing things, and trying different flavors?
Charles Spence [00:51:47] So when I was in 1W in junior school in Leeds in the North of England, we used to have their old wooden desks and used to go in with a lunch box which was an ice cream rectangular box and I remember doing experiments in my desk where I'd invite each and everyone in the classroom to pour something into the concoction to try and make the smelliest, most disgusting sort of fungicidal growth I could do. And so I was experimenting, does Coke work better than, it does actually work quite well to this kind of sandwich of that kind of meat until Mr. Westmoreland of the 1W had a desk inspection to find out where that terrible smell was coming from and made me deposit it at the furthest end of the schoolyard. And for ever since I've been, I suppose, interested in, maybe in the bad end, what's the worst, the smelliest, the most disgusting thing you can do. And now sort of switching to the other end of the spectrum and taking the same. Curiousity about combining the senses in order to try and create more harmonious and tasty memorable food experiences.
