Why we should play with our food The power of mental imagery
one night
i was fast asleep when i heard some
strange noises coming from the kitchen
downstairs
thinking i might have a rabbit squirrel
or a rummaging raccoon
i armed myself with my iphone flashlight
on my slippers
and i charged downstairs only to find my
three-year-old daughter kamia
plopped in front of the pantry cupboard
her face all covered with
melted chocolate kamya has earned the
nickname candy queen
because of her immense love for all
forms of candy
as a behavioral scientist i am always
analyzing my children’s behavior
i can’t but be curious about all the
interactions they have with things
around them
i watch them all the time even how they
eat their cake and their chocolate
i noticed that when cake was lying out
kamiya nibbled more when the fork was on
the left of the plate
and said my son nibbled more when the
fork was on the right
why i wondered their behavior
can probably be explained by the
pictures of cake that you see here
like kamia and said you’re probably
drawn more to one of these two forks
but which one for those of you who are
right-handed
i can bet it’s the fork on the right
side that’s because the fork on the left
is too cumbersome to mentally pick up
such as the power of mental imagery
in the mental imagery here we don’t just
involve our visual sense
we involve our sense of movement we
imagine moving to pick up that fork
for the last 20 years i have been
working on multi-sensory imagery
i look at how people not just imagine
pictures
but imagine sound smell touch and taste
and then i look at how this imagery
impacts their behavior
i want to tell you today how important
this
imagery is in our lives
we have non-conscious multi-sensory
interactions with the world around us
all the time we will have much more fun
and enjoy the world
more if we look into our own
non-conscious multi-sensory responses
in the mental experiment we just did
when the fork is towards our dominant
hand
it automatically triggers an image of us
picking us picking it up and eating the
cake
it’s a visceral response we just want it
this kind of mental imagery is very
important in our lives as humans for
making us more efficient
when we see the fork we mentally pick it
up
and then when we actually go to pick up
the fork our movement is much faster
than it would have been
had we not engaged in this mental
imagery
we do the same kind of imagery when we
turn a door
turn on a faucet or put on our shoes
the imagery is also very realistic
let’s take soup as an example
just as we cannot pick up a soup spoon
with our right hand if you’re already
holding a glass of water in our right
hand
we also can’t imagine it let’s test it
out
try to imagine picking up that soup
spoon
now clench your right hand and then
imagine picking it up
is it more difficult so what we see here
is that mental imagery
is very real and that small changes in
the placement of forks and spoons
change how much we interact with them
and how much
we desire that cake
if advertisers want us to be tempted by
their food
they should facilitate this mental
imagery
in this ad you can imagine picking up
that spoon quite
easily but in this ad
campbell has taken away the spoon that’s
a mistake
only a dog can mentally simulate eating
that soup
and if you don’t want to keep nibbling
on that cake
take away that fork or put it towards
your non-dominant hand
if there is no fork it’ll reduce your
mental imagery and your desire for the
cake
reflecting on how mental imagery changes
the propensity
of people to engage with something cause
me to create a new field of marketing i
call
sensory marketing marketing suggests
that products themselves
speak to humans let’s take the example
of the hershey kiss
hershey has made chocolate in slab form
but then it’s very cleverly converted
the chocolate slab into the hershey kiss
now the hershey kiss is not a simple
chocolate
the hershey kiss speaks to us it says
unfold me from my flag and unwrap me
like a present
i am a bite-sized present just for you
you can put me on your tongue and twirl
me around and i will melt right there
there are no words and no written
advertising
this is all done through multi-sensory
imagery when we see
the flag on top of the chocolate hear
the crinkle of the wrapper
and feel the chocolate melting on our
fingers
and the mental interactions are not just
with our hands but with all our senses
imagery makes life fun
products that engage us in this kind of
mental imagery also have
other consequences unfortunately
businesses can charge more for them but
the good news is
that when food engages us and so really
our stomach gets full with a smaller
quantity
so if the chocolate engages all our
senses we eat less of it
i know that sounds counter-intuitive but
it’s been shown by researchers jan
cornell and pierre shendon
another thing also happens which is even
more interesting
when food engages us sensorily the taste
also changes so if the chocolate
engages all our senses engages our sound
smell
touch and vision and not just taste
alone the taste of that chocolate
improves this is also something i have
shown in my lab
note that people typically talk about
visual imagery
imagining a scene a picture or a visual
we also call this seeing with the mind’s
eye
but can we hear with the mind’s ear or
smell with the mind’s nose
i’m talking here about imagining smell
or what i call
smellizing
i was still studying my daughter
kamiya’s behavior
i noticed that my little candy queen
came running downstairs when she could
smell brownies baking
i wondered would she also come running
down if she could just
imagine the smell i had to put this to
the test
now researchers have always wondered
whether people can imagine smells
i could go to somebody and say hey can
you imagine the smell of brownies
but that won’t be very reliable so what
i do instead is
i look at whether behavioral
consequences of
imagining smell mimic those of real
smell
we know that people salute when they
smell food
will they also salute when they imagine
the smell of food
and salivate to the same degree
for this i needed to measure people’s
salivation
i divided my test subjects into three
groups
all three groups saw this picture of
brownies
but i had one group given the real smell
of brownies
i made one group imagine the smell of
brownies
and the third group did neither what i
found was that the group that imagined
the smell of brownies
salivated to the same extent as the
people
who got the real smell of brownies
that’s the blue and the green bars here
and these two groups salivated
significantly more
than the group that did neither neither
imagine the smell
nor smell the real smell that’s the
orange bar here
the difference was 0.4 grams that means
the group that
imagined the smell salivated eight drops
more
than the group that didn’t imagine the
smell can you picture
eight drops of saliva coming down a
person’s mouth
that’s a lot of saliva
but in all seriousness what this
experiment shows is that
indeed people can imagine smells and
that behavioral consequences of
imagining smell
mimic those of real smell
this experiment and the findings from
this experiment
have implications for restaurants trying
to sell
food online during the pandemic
if they ask their customers to imagine
the smells their customers would long
for that food more
of course if you’re hefty trash bags you
don’t want people to imagine
the smell of the product
i could also include real smells in ads
take this ad for instance this ad came
out in rolling stone magazine in august
it’s for the tv show weeds
it has a scent strip on the side and the
scent strip has the smell of weed
can you imagine drug sense in magazines
but this scent is supposed to make
people remember to see the tv show
now if i wanted to sell a weed brownie
i could have a similar ad with the smell
of weed on the side
and then hope that people would salivate
more for my brownie and desire it more
that is one experiment i did not try
with my children
people always say that we shouldn’t play
with our food
but i have found in my research that
playing with food
makes the experience much more enjoyable
just putting a fork or a spoon next to
the food
makes us long much more for it turning a
chocolate slab into a hershey kiss
makes us fall in love with the chocolate
because it involves all our senses
and asking us to imagine the smell of
brownies
literally makes us salivate more for it
learning about sensory imagery has
changed my life
i find much more pleasure in all my
experiences
including my eating experiences
i have taught companies how to make
inanimate objects talk to us all
and i have learned how vital the senses
are to my moods and behavior
i would encourage all of you to focus
more on your senses
you can begin the way i did and play
with your food
or your children’s food a bit more
thank you