“circleWait a minute, wait a minute. You haven't heard anything yet. ” So was the first line of dialogue heard in the 1927 feature film. jazz singer. This was the first time that the mass media had conveyed the sights and sounds of the scene together, and the audience was captivated.
Since then, black and white has given way to color, frame rates and resolutions have increased, and sound quality has improved, but the media we consume still remains overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, our eyes and ears. We are responding to
The average person now spends nearly seven hours a day watching screens, and with most of that time spent indoors, our overreliance on sight and sound is only increasing. But given that humans are animals with five senses (or more), we are ignoring other functions, and what is that doing to us? ?
Many psychologists classify our primary senses as either rational or emotional, and there is evidence to support this. “odor [and taste are] Charles Spence, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, says: “Rational senses such as hearing and vision are directly connected to emotional processing areas of the brain, but they are processed in the cortex.” In fact, Spence says more than half of the neocortex, and therefore more than half of the brain's volume, is dedicated to processing what we see.
There's no denying that we are highly visual creatures, which is part of the reason why our media is primarily audiovisual. “I think this is largely due to the fact that much of the information we consider important today is conveyed through visual and auditory means,” says Maike Scherer, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Durham University. “But what we think is important isn't necessarily what we need.”
If you ask people which sense they can't live without, most people will say sight, but evidence shows that what we really lack is smell. “The rates of suicide and suicidal ideation are much higher among people with anosmia, because anosmia is so tied to our emotions,” Scherer says.
So does ignoring some senses in favor of others affect our emotional lives? Our emotional health is tied to our social health, but… The answer is almost certainly yes. “Smell is a very important cue for social communication, but this is something that is not implemented in any of the technologies we use today,” Scherer says.
For example, it has been found that after shaking someone's hand, we tend to subconsciously smell their palm. “It gives you hints about all sorts of things, from their health to their age and even their personality,” Spence says. “A lot is lost when we only interact digitally.”
Touch is equally important to our emotional lives, and the finger-focused haptics of digital devices are not enough. C-tactile afferents are a type of nerve receptor that is abundant in the hairy skin of the arms (but not on the pads of the fingers) and has been shown to produce positive emotions when stimulated. “These receptors like slow, warm, tactile strokes,” says Spence.
The cool and smooth touch screen of your smartphone cannot replace other human skin, which is soft, warm and imperceptibly smelly. For adults, this may mean less satisfaction with their social lives, but for a generation of children who are increasingly socialized through technology, the effects can be profound.
Scherer says children learn to interpret their own senses by referring to each other's senses. We learn to associate subtle smells with the sound of someone yelling or the sight of a smile, and may learn to use these signals to navigate social situations in the future. “Children who grow up with less input basically have less training to be able to categorize what certain things smell like and what certain exposures mean,” Scherer said. To tell. “If you suddenly take away something that has evolved over millions of years, you're not only removing one sense from her, but it's affecting how all of her other senses work.”
Marianna Obrist, Professor of Multisensory Interfaces at University College London, said: Everything is multisensory. ”
For example, it's easy to think that the experience of eating is primarily about taste, but the shape and color, smell and sizzle, temperature, texture and weight of food are influenced by our senses of sight, smell, hearing and touch. appeal to. “All these senses are already activated before you eat,” says Obrist. Then there's mouthfeel, the physical sensation of spiciness and sourness, and of course, flavor.
Removing just one of those sensations can affect the entire experience. For example, when people eat ice cream in the dark, they're less likely to enjoy it and aren't even sure what it tastes like. “Each time we receive multisensory stimulation, we are able to develop a better and richer representation of our surroundings,” Scherer says.
So What are we doing to make our technology more multisensory? Obrist has previously encouraged designers to come up with new ways to integrate touch, smell, and taste into products. He led SenseX, an EU-funded project aimed at supporting The team's efforts included spraying scents under subjects' noses to highlight key moments in director Christopher Nolan's film. interstellarwhich blasts ultrasonic waves to simulate contact and uses powerful acoustics to float food onto your tongue without the need for wires or tubes.
It's hard to imagine we'll be seeing Robert Duvall's Lt. Col. Kilgore give a speech any time soon. apocalypse of hellThe most famous line, while the smell of eau na palm hits your nose from your laptop in the morning, the smell-taste interface may be just around the corner. Researchers are already using AI to try to find the primary odor that creates any odor, and Obrist hopes to create a digitally controlled system with applications in research, healthcare, and immersive reality experiences. I'm the chief scientific officer at OWidgets, a company that makes scent delivery systems.
Companies like China's Dexta Robotics are also bringing haptics to virtual reality with a glove called Dexmo.
“Dexmo can provide haptic and force feedback simultaneously,” said Aler Gu, CEO of Dexta. “So when you scroll your finger over a virtual brick, you can feel the surface texture. When you grab a brick and move it from one point to another, you can feel its physical shape.”
Media that engage all of our senses will certainly enrich our daily interactions with technology, but it's not hard to imagine more insidious uses emerging. In 1957, an American market researcher named James Vicary claimed to have created a movie by splicing together the scenes “Eating Popcorn'' and “Drinking Coca-Cola.'' He reported that sales of popcorn and Coca-Cola increased by 57.5% and 18.1% respectively, and the concept of subliminal advertising was born.
Vicary was later exposed as a scam, and the effectiveness of subliminal advertising has been a subject of debate ever since, but technology that can deliver smells and tastes digitally could be a gift to unscrupulous advertisers. “Our bodies have very strong emotional responses to things like: [these senses]. They can be very powerful,” says Scherer. “We're very emotional decision-makers, so there's a lot of potential for that to influence our decisions.”
Research has shown that exposure to certain tastes and smells can influence our judgments of other people's appearance and personality, and even change our behavior. For example, tasting bitter foods can lead to feelings of hostility, and a 2005 patent application suggests that the scent of pink grapefruit can make men think women are younger than their actual age.
Obrist's team found that sour taste can make people more willing to engage in risky behavior. “You might be doing electronic banking or shopping online and drinking a sour lemon drink. That may indirectly influence your decision-making,” she says. say. It's not hard to imagine how e-commerce and gambling apps will be affected. Devices that can deliver tastes and smells can be exploited.
To some extent, this is already happening. Companies are known for creating pleasant scents in their stores, and American chain Cinnabon deliberately placed its ovens near the entrance to its stores and smoked nothing but sugar and cinnamon to tempt passing shoppers. Sometimes I burn the tray I put it in.
What if we take it even further? Of the roughly 63 million people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, the vast majority had only experienced him in two senses. What if news organizations used our devices to broadcast one political candidate's speech while delivering the faint scent of sour milk and another freshly baked biscuits?
After all, a 1940 study showed that people were more or less likely to identify with political slogans such as “Down with war and fascism!” and “Workers of the world unite!” I am. and “America for Americans!” It depends on whether you were exposed to the smell of rot or given a free lunch.
If this news allows us and our leaders to taste the air pollution in Delhi, feel the wildfires in California, smell the smoke and sewage in Gaza, then it appeals to our more emotional senses. Will we take action or bury our heads deeper? sand? It's hard to imagine an audience willing to accept such a sensory assault, but our senses have evolved to help us navigate and react to the world we live in. From that point of view, using only two of them is less than ideal. “The more information you have, the more you can actually act in your environment,” Scherer says.
For now, Scherer suggests, instead of putting up with digital technology that stimulates the senses we've been neglecting, we can go out and see friends in person, feel the breeze on our skin, and smell the roses. suggests. After all, as far as our devices are concerned, we haven't smelled anything yet.