The Role of Smell in Social Communication: How Technology is Affecting our Senses

“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 conveyed the sights and sounds of the scene together, and the audience was mesmerized.

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 if a human considers that he is a five (or five) animal, probably even more) senses, aren’t we ignoring other abilities? And what is it 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.” In fact, Spence says more than half of the neocortex, and therefore more than half of the brain’s volume, is devoted 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,” said Meike Scherer, an 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, if you eat ice cream in the dark, It is unlikely that you will enjoy it, or even be sure of 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? sense x, an EU-funded project aimed at helping designers come up with new ways to integrate feel, smell and taste into products. The team’s efforts included spraying scents under subjects’ noses to highlight key moments in director Christopher Nolan’s film interstellar, irradiate ultrasound to simulate contact, Powerful acoustics to suspend food It can be attached to the tongue without the need for wires or tubes.

It’s hard to imagine I’ll be watching it any time soon. Colonel Kilgore’s speech by Robert Duvall 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 tactility to virtual reality with gloves called “gloves.” 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 fraudster, and the effectiveness of subliminal advertising has gained worldwide attention. discussion issues Since then, has technology that can deliver smells and tastes digitally become a gift to unscrupulous advertisers? Masu. [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, taste bitter foods can make us hostile,and 2005 patent application The scent of pink grapefruit suggests to men that it can make women appear younger than their actual age.

Obrist’s team discovered that: Sour taste makes 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 pumping pleasant scents into their stores, and American chain Cinnabon Intentionally place the oven near the store entrancesometimes creating baking trays with just sugar and cinnamon to tempt passing shoppers.