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

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

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