How Aperol, Coco Cola, Tony's Chocolonely Hack Your Brain - University of Oxford Professor Charles Spence

24:23I don't know.

24:28Okay, so I suppose you might say, well, red ought to be bad for, doesn't, you know, the red of McDonald's, then doesn't that cue blood of, it doesn't somehow.

24:42Charles Spence:So I haven't heard any problems with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but I'm saying that why is it a good thing for KFC, the red? Is it like, does it? It's their brand color generally, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. It's a sort of consistent appearance or cues across packaging or product formats. Yeah. Interesting. the what i wanted to ask you about is when and i think mcdonald's do a great job of this is when what is happening to us when we like read like so i think um on a matter peer and alliteration like in branding or like messaging like i don't know what it does i think there's a thing called the keats heuristic which keats was like the poet and it's like when we see these things it it makes us has this kind of effect on us i'd love to really dive into that with you charles When you see, I think McDonald's have a thing which is for their breakfast muffin, it's 7.45, 8, mmm, like as an mmm.

25:38Charles Spence:What's happening in our brains when we see that kind of stuff?

25:45I suppose we're probably internally sounding out that, sort of speaking in our head the things that we read. Well, not everyone. Many people have that sort of voice in their head, So sort of hear the sounds that are written.

26:08And it may be, you know, whatever the social psychology trick. This one might still be valid, I'm not sure. Putting like a pen in your mouth. And then you smile. And if you smile, then you're happier.

26:22Charles Spence:Wow, okay. Or the other one that doesn't replicate, or maybe it does, or who knows. the power pose and like superwoman and you'll be more forceful um so if you if your body adopts the posture then you kind of come to believe it and becomes true sort of self-fulfilling in a way so if you smile whether or not you're happy you'll feel a little bit happier so i guess maybe if you hear inside your head going hmm yeah yeah maybe then that that um is what you normally do in response to something you like yeah and so maybe it sort of carries over um we just got a project funded at the moment just starting on um uh sort of stomach gurgles yeah yeah yeah yeah to see whether they're contagious or not between people yeah similar way so you know people if somebody yawns that's contagious other people will yawn no one knows quite why um but okay yawning is contagious so we want to see whether the stomach gurgles.

27:20So a lot of people in the lab will play some of these stomach gurgling sounds and see whether that leads them to their stomachs start gurgling

27:26Charles Spence:and whether they start feeling hungrier because of this other. Wow. I hadn't even thought of that. In terms of like tribes, again, in the Savannah, I feel like the best brands, I think Seth Goen writes a book, has got the book, the genius marketeer called Tribes. How do you think brands should think about that? and, again, for our desires to be mimetic human creatures and stuff like that?

27:57Charles Spence:Well, I don't think much about it, really. No, it's kind of always easier to, I guess, study the individual. When people come together, then things get complicated to study. so um yeah i don't uh never really think about uh groups or tribes are always about uh yeah maybe groups of individuals but as individuals yeah yeah yeah um and i guess though um maybe the thing to think about would be how much of this sort of imitation there is and sort of the influences, whether they set the behavior for the group, whether this group or tribe or whatever you call it is not physically together but sort of distributed digitally.

29:01yeah um and maybe you know increasingly uh your tribe may actually not be made up of real people maybe it's avatars yeah yeah yeah um and already i'm seeing some of my colleagues doing stuff on sort of having sort of you know creating groups of virtual online friends wow and um that's mad yeah no

29:27Charles Spence:No, it's interesting because I think, well, Seth's point is our desire, his sort of thesis on marketing is any decision we make is based on three sort of principles, either to gain status, to gain connection or affiliation, i.e., you know, people drinking the Aperol Spritz, you want connection. Especially if you're in a high-end cocktail bar, you're wanting status. But it's also the freedom of fear. Like, again, back to the savannas, if you're out of your tribe, you're basically fucked because a lion could come and eat you sort of thing. so yeah it's interesting but I think what you're saying about these sort of signals of the brand on the supermarket they probably do link together as these sort of beacons even if you look at the golden arches it's like a totemic thing isn't it there's one in Wandsworth where I drive around it's like there's something around that you know supposedly was it Louis Cheskin the Madison Avenue marketing magician two golden breasts don't get rid of that Freudian really what are some other logos because didn't you do something with the 7up Like, talk to me, go into the sort of, what was the 7-Up brief and what?

30:31No, that's another one of a Louis Cheskin's.

30:33Charles Spence:Oh, is that one? Okay, sorry, yeah. Examples. And that one is sort of interesting both, because we find if we ask people to pick a shape for a sweet taste or pick a shape for a bitter taste, then people will pick a round shape for sweetness. People will pick an angular shape for bitter, salty, sour-tasting foods. Sorry, angular like a... Star. Okay. Interesting, yeah. on a round shape like a cloud or a circle for sweet tastes, very robustly. And if we do, we're going to get some Nestle executives. All it takes is 10 of them and give them some milk chocolate, some dark chocolate, sweeter or more bitter, and give them a scale with like a, we call it a booba or kiki, but a round shape or an angular shape, and just say, describe the taste of that chocolate on this scale, and everyone will put the sweeter milk chocolate near the round shape and the angular shape.

31:23The more bitter the chocolate, the more angular the shape you pick. If it's sour taste, it's angular, but it's also asymmetric.

31:29Charles Spence:Are those set in stone rules, or can clever brands, like, mickfuck with people's heads, essentially? They could do. So I think if you know these associations, I think probably Louis Cheskin intuitively picked some of them up, maybe didn't know why they existed or how they extended, but he put this red what's the red circle doing in the middle of the 7up logo doesn't have to be there but red is the colour of sweetness circle is the colour of sweetness so it's kind of queuing sweetness my favourite one would be San Pellegrino or Heineken or pretty much any beer brand will have an angular logo Newcastle Brown one of the first ones very often they've got their story so was it Heineken, this star is a prize winning star, women won a beer competition in 1900 or something San Pellegrino they just don't say but on the top of a San Pellegrino bottle of sparkling water there's a star a big star on the front label, there are a few more stars on the back they're not there on their Aquapana, they're still water brand, only on the sparkling and we find in our lab studies if we give people still water and sparkling water you'll always pick us uh a star for carbonated water interesting um and if it's bitter and carbonated like a beer then all the more reason to have angularity as part of your logo as heineken does as newcastle brown ale does as uh red stripe does as and so on um estrea or even call your brand star in spanish with the star and it's all queuing, I think, the taste.

33:13So normally you'd think if you mix things up, if you have Star on a Stillwater brand, that's going to completely confuse the consumer. Sometimes we just go and pick up based on colour or form from the shelf. There are so many things we move. Is it 1 ,000 or 10 ,000 products we might see on the typical walk through a supermarket? so we can't really process them all so a lot of it's done sort of heuristically just by colour and back in the day was it Walker's sort of played the trick in 1984 I think it was they had they had salt and vinegar crisps and then were the first to introduce cheese and onion new flavour how do you get consumers to try the new flavour well they reversed the colours so cheese and onion is blue something is green for walkers but it's the opposite for other most brands in the marketplace

34:14Charles Spence:interesting yeah and and so they deliberately mixed up the the colour messaging switched it whichever way it is yeah yeah yeah so that consumers would go for their favourite crisp just pick the colour get home and find they've got oh I didn't mean to get the cheese and onion but you've got that first exposure and hopefully it's a nice flavour and walkers can get away with it because they're sort of cheeky brand that's okay other serious brands in other categories much harder and you're more likely to disappoint I think people or I mean the other way to think about it is again Louis Cheskin he did 1940s, 50s working with Fleischmann's Gin I think it was in the States and he says he's brought in to try and increase sales of their gin gin's mostly drunk by the husband of the day but it turned out that it was the housewife who tended to buy it.

35:10And so what he recommended is rounding off the label on the front rather than having a rectangular shape, rounding off the label, and lo and behold, increase sales, because that's more appealing to women, he thought. And the same thing, I think there's something going on, isn't it, with car like you know um ford cars uh fiesta uh car the um granada yeah old cars and a lot of them end with an a yeah they end with sort of a rounded sound yeah and is that because uh again that might be more appealing uh to women who might make their decisions maybe that's sort of a soft and a more caring sound rather than a very forceful, strong letter or speech sound to look at or listen to.

36:04Charles Spence:Yeah, it's like almost just, I think the point there is about the difference between the actual shopper, say, the wife and the consumer and the husband at home. Say you were to start a brand or a lot of people listening to this have got brands who are trying to disrupt categories. And I think there's this blandemic of brands in the sense you go and look at a category. If you look at your category, you become your category. like it ultimately and i feel especially because i saw this with protein bars a lot of them just ended up being other versions of grenade that was sort of the category leader um you're probably seeing it in snacking where all snacking brands or challenger snacking brands specifically look pretty much the same how would you if you want to disrupt a category what would what are some of the again almost like key stage two math versions of it right if they can't people can't afford to come to the University of Oxford.

36:52Charles Spence:What are some of the ways they could do that?

37:02Successfully. So, I mean, I guess whatever the category, there will be a colour codes. For the crisps, it's the blue or green for cheese and onion, whichever way it is. For milk, then it's, what is it, blue for no fat, red.

37:21Charles Spence:semi-green for full. So there's another colour. Same colours, but they have different meaning. So one way is to disrupt there, because that will then stand out on the shelf. One of the things I often think about is image moulds, sort of a notion from the 70s or 80s, early psychology of packaging research. and they say take something like maybe the best packages, their shape will match the taste or flavor. So sweet things should be in round, angular things for bitter, and if not the shape of the package but the shape of the label or the shape of the typeface. And there are some things like wishbone salad dressing.

38:12Wishbone? Yeah, all sorts of 70s. So if you think about what does salad dressing bottle look like in a silhouette? It's kind of a...

38:19Charles Spence:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is kind of an image mould. That shape, if I show you the silhouette, you'll think salad dressing, as it happens because Wishbone came out with it, and then everyone else copies that. Yeah. So if you were trying to do a salad dressing, would you put it in something like the shape of the shard or something like that? Or say if it's olive oil, premium olive oil, then if you put it in what looks like a perfume bottle, as some have done. Yeah. you sort of get all the associations, which is quality and expensive, and, you know, just a few drops of this for free because somebody else has established that image mold, that shape, form, means X.

38:57And so, yeah, when you're thinking about how to package things, then think what, you know, it could be the Covent Garden Soup Company. Don't sell your soup in a can. Put it in a Tetra Pak and put it in the fridge and it seems like it's fresh. And you get all the associations of that sort of Tetra Pak the fridge already established by somebody else, and you can just ride on them. So how could you innovate by picking up somebody else's hard work by taking their image mold or using it, and that will sort of communicate almost subliminally with the consumer? Could it be something about where you put things?

39:41if you have control over I don't know what would be a good example but things that could be that could be in confectionery or they could be in health foods or they could be somewhere else

39:55Charles Spence:Grenade, Al's been on the podcast you know Grenade, the protein bars they're like massive, massive brand they sold to Mondelez but his whole thing was we're absolutely buggered if you put us this was like 5-10 years ago if you put us in the health and wellness sort of functional category because no one walks down there. Their whole genius move was just basically putting grenade, which has got 25 grams of protein, next to Cadbury's dairy milk, next to Twix. And that just, even by just moving it where you are in store, stands out. Yeah, interesting. Maybe sometimes it's hard to demand or dictate where your product will appear, but maybe there's some wiggle room if you're of a certain size.

40:36and I mean the challenge is how do you sort of stand out without then confusing people yes you can change the colour you will stand out you'll get a first purchase but have you lost it after that so what sort of changes or things you need differently that will make you stand out but won't set the wrong expectations. And I don't know for the, I think when I see these olive oils in my perfume bottles, on the one hand, I think that works because that says, you know, this is expensive, premium drops, worth a lot. But on the other hand, I don't want to eat perfume. Yes. It also kind of, to me, it's sort of sending mixed messages in that case.

41:24Charles Spence:Isn't it, there's a thing called the Meyer Principle, which is like the most acceptable yet alternative, which is, as I said, Rory's told me about this, which is like be weird but not too weird because if you're too weird, i.e. perfume out of a bottle, you don't want to be drinking that. So it's that fine dance between standing out but not being too weird that you piss people off and they don't come back for a second purchase. Interesting. What's been some of the hardest briefs you've had to work on for brands?

41:57Probably one recent one. It was a recency effect as much as anything. But it got me thinking there's a lot of interest in the world of perfumes, fragrance, and how can we convey that online for all the online shopping. Well, we can't because it can only do visual, maybe some sound, but you can't smell what you see online. So interesting trying to engage the other senses to evoke what a perfume is like. And that's got us into some of this sort of sonic seasoning again, but trying to design music that will match perfumes. And we know we can make music to bring out the sweetness of chocolate or the bitterness, high-pitched or low-pitched music.

42:39We know we can change the taste of wine and whiskey and whatever else. So food and drinks, it's relatively easy now to create or find soundscapes, music that will match the taste and or accentuate desirable qualities. But when you try and apply that then to perfume, it sounds simple because it's 75 % to 95 % of what you think you're tasting, you're really smelling. So food is really like mostly fragrance aroma. Perfume is just sort of 100 % aroma.

43:13I thought this will be easy. So it was a perfume company. It had four perfumes, three for women, one for men, set in French evening or Parisian night or something like that. And there we can speak to the sort of perfume makers for the brand and figure out exactly what are the key notes, which are the key floral notes and bass notes and so on. But then it actually becomes really hard to come up with a good solution, in part because all perfumes are kind of equally intense. All perfumes kind of have a bass note, a top note, a middle note. So anyway, there's less variation. They're all pleasant. So how can you differentiate between them musically?

44:02It's much harder. Whereas for foods, maybe some are spicy, some are astringent, some come and gone, others linger in your mouth for a long time. There's a lot more kind of range, I think, in flavors than there is in perfumes. That probably makes it hard. And then to think about how we've always been sort of designing note by note. So we'll speak to the master blender and he says, this whiskey starts with, I don't know, a caramel, candied apple, then it's got some spicy notes in the middle, and then it'll end with sort of a textured finish and say, okay, we can find music for the candied apple at the beginning, the sort of sweeter notes, the spicy notes, and for the textured finish.

44:41Charles Spence:Yeah. These are the instruments we want. This is how they should be played. And that's great. But when it comes to the sort of perfume, all of these different things sort of all blend to merge together into one thing. Sure. and hence this sort of note by note creation, I think, good thing, it maybe doesn't work so well. So yeah, it became sort of, we sort of reasonably succeeded, I think. We did create some soundscapes and people could discriminate reasonably well, but I felt that's, you know, actually a much harder problem than I'd realised. Yeah. To, So you think the soundscape, the sonic branding is easier with food than it is with perfume?

45:20Yes.

45:20Charles Spence:Okay, interesting. Or at least to convey, to try and convey the taste or flavour experience is easier. So what brands get the... So Sonic branding is basically audio for your brands. Yes. What brands do that really well? I guess they have to be the ones where you hear their Sonic mnemonic or Sonic logo and immediately you know. So people would talk about Intel inside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And suddenly, you know, as a good example, maybe a Nokia. I don't have my phone, so whatever that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did it well. Others, like British Airways, did it very badly because they had the Pearl Fishers.

46:05La, la, la, la, la, la. And then they gave it up and used something else. So everyone knew British Airways was that. And then they gave it up.

46:15Charles Spence:and

46:20some of the car companies are sort of much touted for not just creating a sort of having a system where you can adapt some kind of core structure of sound but then you can play with different instruments depending where in the world this advert's going to be shown and you can vary its sort of length, depending whether it's just a three or four second Sonic logo, or is it a piece that's going to maintain throughout a three-minute ad? So there's kind of flexibility to modify things.

46:58Charles Spence:Yeah, it's interesting how I think there's a thing going around on social media, which is the Jess Glynn song with the Jet Two Holidays, and a lot of people are just sort of rinsing and repeating it, but it has that immediately, because they use it on the adverts, and it's synonymous with that song. And again, sort of picking up what you're saying. It's like, as soon as you hear that, now, as soon as I hear that song, I think Jetty Holidays. Mad. So you don't have a phone. How does that help you with your creative process or thinking time? Like, how do you spend your time thinking? Like, so I know, you know, Charles Darwin had this walk he'd do every single day to kind of, again, to get his sensory, almost overload himself with all his senses.

47:40Charles Spence:And then we'd go and do creative work. You don't have a phone. and how do you think about things? I just do. You don't have anything to distract you. Yeah. I think. Probably always have a pen and paper.

47:56So, yeah, I guess I would go for three months a year to the place behind here. Yes. And that's in the garden. And do feel that sort of, you know, think differently and get lots of the nature effect from the sounds. So for listeners, that's in Columbia. Yeah, yeah. Cloud Forest. may not leave the front gates for a few months at a time and that is immersed in nature and the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the textures and that does clear your mind and make you think differently than I do when I'm here in Oxford and I've got all my filing cabinets with all my papers it's a bit freer but normally just, yeah I think I'm very much of the opinion that kind of the medium I still do make comments on paper manuscripts from my students and they say can't you just type them in or something this is really awkward but I do think you just think differently not only, sometimes I'll work in here sometimes I'll work there, sometimes I'll work there I think the place where you choose to work makes you think differently I really want to talk about this

48:57Charles Spence:so I obviously when I started this I used to work from home a lot and I get this, it's almost like I've talked to a lot of people who work from home, it's almost this idea rot, it's like I'm not you almost get like a kind of malaise and depression where you're like for that it could be an afternoon and you're just like ugh. I don't know what it is. I'd love to speak to you about this. As soon as I go to a cafe, mood changes. As soon as I go and work from the gym, go to a house. If I mix up where I work, my happiness baseline is way higher and my creativity is way higher. Why? So it might be in some sort of sense hacking book for people who are working at home during COVID.

49:44none of us can smell our own home everyone else's home smells a bit funny probably here smells a bit funny to you but I can't smell anything at all maybe you smell your own home when you come back from a long holiday after three months over in Colombia and I come back here so everyone's home smells everyone's home office has this odor but we don't detect it and why that matters and why changing it helps is that if we've had a stressful meeting or just got bogged down or the idea rot then that sort of negative feeling will be associated with the smell in just the same way when you go to the dentist

50:21Charles Spence:and you smell the clothes the usual you get stressed immediately yeah you weren't born that way but you just learned when i smell that smell what it means is pain um so my sort of suggestion for the dentist is you know every six months you should change the smell doesn't matter what the smell is but then you won't trigger all those negative associations for your customers yeah people try this now we're presenting the um dentist surgery orange flavor and smell and that reduces stress levels yeah you do the same thing at hospitals and i think for the home then if you had a stressful meeting or he's got bogged down and can't then your state is probably partly being triggered by the smell wow and so if you have to stay at home i just say get a get a fresh smell I'll spray some different aroma and that'll be like an olfactory reset or go somewhere else, go to the coffee shop and smell coffee.

51:12Might be an alerting, a rousing smell in and of itself. But that's a switch, change of environment or change of format. So from computer to paper for me, from one space to another, is how you keep things.

51:29Charles Spence:Yeah, I think analogue to digital is really interesting. one of the founder of Brewdog the beer brand has an analog desk and a digital desk and he'll do like his analog work will be obviously just pens and papers ideas thinking and then switches to a completely different desk when what's going on with the sounds so when I'm in a coffee shop and for some perplexing reason I can do amazing work on a train why what's going on there with the sound specifically I feel like it just switches yeah my left brain off basically yeah I used to love coming back from Australia and used to travel there a lot, and that's like 24 hours.

52:08And you get a couple of papers written, one on Singapore and the other one,

52:11Charles Spence:because you're stuck, you can't go anywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this was before they had internet on things, so you're kind of stuck there and you've got to make that time pass. And the best way for me is to distract and write something. That was perfect. You couldn't find anywhere else because you always think, well, I'll make myself a cup of coffee or I'll go and check the news feed or do something else, make the bed. I think most of us probably find it very easy to distract ourselves with something else. And some of these situations will be where you're forced to be in a fixed location. I remember the trains and planes, coffee shops.

52:51It could be the smell of coffee. It's probably what may alert you. And there's research of alerting smells, as well as be it peppermint, probably coffee, can have that sort of positive impact. Interesting. And whether it's something, if you see other people there, does that help too? You see other people in their coffees, as we call it these days,

53:15Charles Spence:kind of coffee in office. Coffees, I love that. Yeah, yeah. And I can see them down the street here. We've got, I don't know how many coffee shops, 10 of them from nowhere, full of students and sort of maybe feed off each other in some sense and there's something like I don't know whatever the group activity you get in the cinemas one of the fun studies I read recently sometimes we watch films at home but it's not quite the same as watching them as a cinema it's like comedy is always funny when you're with people and so people have been analysing the smell of cinemas taking the extractor fan from a cinema and just analysing it chemically and they can see these changes in the olfactory signature from all those people in the cinema depending on the kind of movie they're watching and that sort of olfactory triggering maybe again, maybe part of what makes being together in a group makes the film more enjoyable.

54:10Is there something of that in them? Yeah, there's definitely,

54:13Charles Spence:like what I miss about the cinema, not that I ever went a lot often, but was that, is the, I don't know, something that happened to you palpably when you walked in and you'd smell the popcorn. Again, I'm just asking you a lot of curious questions here. But you don't get that on Netflix? you know you're missing that vital element the so you do very correctly you grew up like parents with fairgrounds or something talk to me about that what if you could sum up your childhood in distinct sounds or colors that sort of viscerally comes you now what they'd be um so it'd be my grandfather's green dark dark green wagon that's williams green that you'd see um it would be the smell of um derv diesel engine whatever it stands for but kind of war war period um cheap white diesel i think yeah um used to power all the machines and the and the wagons and uh yeah so sort of the the there's no running water so um uh yeah only had a bath once a year so sort of bodily odors and then i actually just wrote a paper about this that um so you only had a bath once a year oh he did, my grandfather so by the time I was born my parents had moved off when they got married we were going back to see my uncles and aunts and grandparents and where was this?

55:38Bradford and then the outside toilet

55:50horrible smells and dark and no lighting and you always wait until you got home to believe yourself.

56:01And then I guess of the sort of background itself of all the dirt and dogs and lights and a very sort of multi-sensory experience.

56:16Charles Spence:and you know what I would say is like it is there's kind of the life for on the fairground in the winter months when there are no fairs which is where I'd say my grandfather and then kind of when the show comes to town as it does here in the first Monday and Tuesday after the first Sunday in September every year and then it's sort of a full multi-sensory overload and I want to say you know all these people who are doing a sort of virtual reality and the metaverse and it's immersive I think no it's not really mostly but on a fairground ride that is kind of the ultimate immersive when you're on the waltzes or the waltzes you just cannot think about anything else you're about to die and that is a complete that is I think the ultimate in the moment immersed experience I find that with go-karting as well for some weird reason I don't know what it is I think again it's a bit like a sensory orgy you know and like not like I've been go-karting very few times but you come off it and you're like you're not thinking about anything else my friend's just got a motorbike he says the same thing because you want headspace, go and get a motorbike.

57:19Charles Spence:So talk to me more about the fairgrounds. Were you travelling around with your parents? Oh, my parents settled down after they got married to give their children a better chance in life. Yeah. So we'd go and see my uncles and aunts stayed on for longer than my grandparents. So they were still doing the fairgrounds? Yep. Wow. Actually, I was been writing a piece actually on sort of the liminal space that is the fairground for some magazine. What's the liminal space? It's just like somewhere that's neither here nor there. Yeah. If you go on Wikipedia, it says liminal spaces, like empty office blocks and kind of places where there should be people, but there's nobody.

57:55But I think the fairgrounds are another liminal space where it's kind of dangerous, but you can go there occasionally. It comes one night and disappeared the next day. When did they start, these fairgrounds? 12th century, 13th century.

58:10Charles Spence:Wow. Mostly, I mean, it sort of changed their roles over the centuries. Initially it was just sort of trade and maybe hiring fairs. My great-great-grandfather introduced moving pictures and ghost shows. Cinema. Oh, wow. In the 1890s and ghost shows and sort of illusions shows. Dr. Pepper's Ghost and the Phantasmagoria. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These kind of experiences. And then in the sort of 20th century, then you get increasing attraction engines and electricity and then steam-powered rides, so you get things that move and the waltzes and the dodgems and the cakewalks and the gallopers and the whatever else.

58:53Charles Spence:How did that, seeing, again, the multi-century overload as a kid with its fairgrounds, what really pulled you into this? What pulled your curiosity into this space?

59:08In part, I was going to a conference a few years ago on proprioceptive art. What is proprioceptive art by some philosophers in Germany? When you say proprioceptive. Like bodily, if you're feeling you're artists who make you feel your body. Yes. So there's, I forget the guy's name, but he has like a massive net suspended near the roof of the building. Yeah. and you climb over it like a spider's web, and you can see the ground tens of metres down, and all that's separating you is this kind of wire. So then you're very aware of your body. Or others where the art piece is where you sort of fall into something, like a big cushion.

59:53A Brazilian artist does that. So it's artists who make you feel your body in a way. For a perception, there's a sense of where your body is. When I went to that conference, I just got to think, well no in fact you know the fairground is a much better place for proprioceptive making you feel about your body in different ways um and and sort of the immersive thing and um uh i just wanted to know we've got some posters from the 1890s you know so the uh the great randall williams um with his phantasmagoria what's that exactly so it becomes a thing well i wonder what sort of read as this sort of newspaper advert and poster and things, and Dr.

1:00:35Pepper's ghost. And sort of parked it, no idea what that is. But then you sort of get curious about, well, what was he actually doing? And these were sort of early ghost shows with, I think, maybe a bit like, have been repopularised these days, maybe with the ABBA thing, a bit where you have an actor under the stage and then sort of a semi-silvered glass, at 45 degrees and actors on the stage so the audience are looking at the actors on the stage but you can also project with bright lights ghosts yeah here to appear and interact with the real actors yeah um that was that dr pepper's ghost initially at the royal institution in london and then i think my grandfather took the idea and put it on the fairground as entertainment and the Phantasmagoria comes from sort of Paris crypts in the 1700s where they'd have smoke and lantern shows and sort of project ghosts and he was doing that in a fairground tent.

1:01:38So all sort of ghostly apparitions, illusions for up to 1 ,000 people and that then morphs into kind of these ghosts that are on screens which is cinema and I say he was the first one he took the Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee

1:02:00Charles Spence:or Silver Jubilee in 1896 or 1895 and he didn't film it it was filmed in London with all the processions and then the film came up to Manchester in fact and he showed it in the Manchester or Liverpool so that sort of really pulled you into this space and sort of reading this history then it sort of resonates both as

1:02:25what I spend a lot of my time doing is illusions of different sorts. And here he was doing illusions. We have rubber hand illusions. We have butcher's tongue illusions.

1:02:34Charles Spence:Butcher's tongue illusions. Where we stick your tongue out and put your head in this sort of box with some mirrors. And when you look down, it looks like you can see your tongue which is stuck out. but in fact it's a butcher's tongue that's over there instead oh wow then we can sort of drop drop lemon juice on the on the butcher's tongue and stroke it and you think that's your tongue yeah it's not there's kind of version of the rubber hand illusion um uh so we do lots of these illusions too so there's some sort of synergy there of that and also he was i guess going to the royal um polytechnic institute on regent street in london in the 1890s 1880s where there was a first um kind of crossover between science and entertainment.

1:03:21So the Royal Polytechnic Institute was there to sort of interest the public in science and sort of popularise it on planets and all sorts of electricity and these illusions. My great-grandfather then sort of took that, sort of the scientific insight and turned it into an entertainment experience. And nowadays, you know, with the idea of sort of popularisation of science and trying to get sort of public engagement in science. It's sort of happening again in a way. And then, yeah, through to these rides with multisensory, the most immersive experiences. So if you're interested in VR, as I am, and trying to create immersive experiences for brands, well, then what other tricks might you find from the fairground?

1:04:09Charles Spence:What are some of those? Hmm. Keeping that in your back pocket for now. I love that, Charles. And then it goes on to the fair when it comes here now. It's got churros and stuff, which I'm sure weren't around long ago. But it's got the sounds and the smells of all the food and all these sort of family foods and toffee apples and pomegranates and candy floss and brandy snaps. and coconuts all these sort of fairground foods sort of sort of disappeared and rock even sort of fairground rock was before seaside rock so some of our foods I kind of go back to that time and that may be the the what could people learn when I was researching these sort of proprioceptive pleasures all these fairground rides that move you there's sort of books on designing roller coasters and one of them, the guy's sort of famous for it and says you don't need to be an engineer to design a good roller coaster, you need to be a psychologist.

1:05:24Charles Spence:Okay, go unpack that more. Yeah, because, well, it probably helps if you're an engineer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's a lot of psychology and that's sort of the sound of the thing and this, what do they call it? Like the dog ratchet or something when the seats go up the incline, then it says kind of clack, clack, clack, clack, clack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's really important because that builds up your anticipation and your sort of fear, as does hearing the screams of those on the rides. I was talking about this with my brother and father last night. In fact, remembering, I think it was, they used to go to Manchester decades ago and there was like a wooden a wooden rollercoaster and again it's that sort of sound of it, the creaking it was what made it really really scary and they can remember it decades later but this creaking of wood sort of psychological fear through the on the kind of ghost trains when you sort of pulled around and they would have these danglers which is like bits of string which could be a ghost and as you're pulled around then sort of brush against your face and you have to be taken past it because if you're sort of static then you just get really annoyed and sort of yank it off because it happens so quickly you can't and so these sort of sensory cues that you might not think about you might think all we need to know about for designing a roller coaster is how high how big an incline but no you can sort of ramp up through the other senses yeah the yeah utterly fascinating i love i love to explore what we've just talked about and also cinema and how what do what are some of the lessons or principles restaurants you work from the best restaurants in the world work with heston obviously know ashley very well our mutual friend um what are some of the lessons restaurants can learn from cinema?

1:07:26So, that is kind of my current review that's under review at the moment. Oh, really? It's sort of morphed into that.

1:07:36Charles Spence:Well, so that's just completely random, yeah. That's mad. So, I think a lot of the time... Sorry, when you say under review, you're basically writing a paper on this. Yeah, I've written a paper and no one wants to publish it so we're battling with the reviewers to see which is all about counterpoint. Counterpoint, as in? which is kind of a musical notion when you have different, I'm not a musician, but you have different sort of parts and they're doing the opposite thing, music. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So initially it's just that. One group of singers doing blah, blah, blah, and the other ones are doing something the opposite or something different.

1:08:10So they're kind of one's in the counterpoint to the other. And then it turns out that that's also used in film. So I've just been reviewing kind of the hearing and vision in film, over going back, of course, to the very earliest silent films and then from there forward. I'm very often thinking about, well, how do filmmakers use sound to augment the visual action?

1:08:43And then from there thinking, well, is that very similar to how a chef might use music to augment a dining experience? and we've done lots of stuff. We get matching music to dishes, for meals and very often you sort of find music that matches the taste experience or the journey so it's in perfect alignment hopefully or you might use music to elevate the mood or to darken the mood. Again, that's used in film but then you start seeing from the 30s or 40s this idea of counterpoint appearing in cinemas, which is where you might have a really nasty scene, but with happy music. So think of Clockwork Orange.

1:09:31Charles Spence:Yeah. And whatever the violent rape scene and lots of malinkum of violence. And some of that is played alongside happy music. It's like a counterpoint. It's interesting. There's a restaurant. I know I always say it's like if Quentin Tarantino was to open a restaurant. Yeah, yeah. For me, and I'd love to explore who that would be for you, for me it's a place called, well, formerly known as Black Axe Mangal in Islington. Sorry, yeah, Highbury Corner, Islington. And he worked for St. John. I don't know who the restaurant, St. John. And he was the head chef there. And you walk in and they've got these, literally, they look like these sort of monsters on the wall.

1:10:14Charles Spence:It's very dark and black. There's not even a sign on the outside. and upstairs is either blasting hip-hop, it's this really dark space with this big oven, really intimate blasting hip-hop or blasting death metal, and you're just eating this really delicious food, but it's kind of a bit of a weird juxtaposition. Then you go downstairs and it's all beautiful colours, a bit like that back wall behind us now, and they're playing almost soft, almost like you're going into a Japanese spa or something like that, and it's just this fucking mental juxtaposition. and it's just the most wonderfully mad place.

1:10:50Charles Spence:Who would you say is the Quentin Tarantino of chefs? One might think of Rasmus Munk, I suppose, the alchemist. Right. Sorry, who is he for the conference? I'm sorry. The world's best chef last year. Yeah. The fifth best by some ranking this year. Based in? Copenhagen. Yep. So just down the road from Noma. Yep. and he has this massive like a 50 course 50 experience menu but 20 or 30 of the courses are in this sort of massive dome with projections of things that may match the dish but because of the logistics sometimes they don't match the dish which is a counterpoint but not deliberate in a way with all sorts of sort of shocking juxtapositions of some chicken eaten from their feet and taking it from a chicken cage sort of stuff.

1:11:59I've seen this. Plastic Fantastic and eating an eyeball and a wobbling brain is one of the other courses he brought out where it's like a film prop of a head and take off the top of the skull. and inside there's a wobbling lambourine dish.

1:12:15Charles Spence:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen this guy on Instagram. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know exactly who you're talking about. Interesting. What would you say... So what are some other films that you've studied? Again, just a little on that thread of cinemas and restaurants. So there's some... It goes back to, I think, one of the striking ones is just from the 1930s. No, it must be about 50s, I think. early color film um and there it just starts the film starts with this nice um meadows and trees and birds and things with a nice happy pastoral music um and then it turns out where you're actually looking at is uh inside of a concentration camp wow but you've been so misled by the music to think this is a happy nice sort of thing we're about to see and then it's like you know all the thousands of shoes and whatever clothes of those who were guests and such like.

1:13:11So that's a very shocking one.

1:13:14Charles Spence:Sorry to interrupt. Juxtaposition as a thing, as a concept in branding, I think is really interesting. Or just in any experience. So I think our life, and I would love to explain to you, we sort of just meander along when we see... Because writers, I'm reading Doss' Test, I can't pronounce it, but I'm reading Notes from the Underground, and you see it in some of the best writers. they'll use like you know I voluptuously stunk you know or like you know putting two words that shouldn't work together the other brand I love at the minute is a brand called Juba which is a beer brand but their whole thing is dangerously refreshing when you see juxtaposition whether it's the cow meadows with a concentration camp what's that, why is that working?

1:13:58Charles Spence:or is that just, what's the crap about? jarring and shocking yeah I mean you might think well maybe in the case of say in the Clockwork Orange does it make it less you might think these things this ultraviolence on the one hand with this sort of pleasant music on the other maybe they sort of average each other out and it becomes less shocking but somehow it does the opposite it becomes more shocking Is that Stanley Kubrick? Yeah Okay because didn't he do 2001 Space Yeah Okay yeah Why was he such a genius? I don't know I've never really watched much of his stuff but yeah maybe thought carefully about the music he he used so yeah whatever it was I think it was 2001 they had some composer creating stuff and then he sort of threw all that out and then took the music instead I think so it shouldn't have to be sort of the iconic whenever whatever it's yeah somewhere the opening scenes with all the weird monkeys isn't it I don't because one of the things I'll do on YouTube, I go on a YouTube rabbit hole and I can end up watching the creative process of directors, which I can endlessly get really into.

1:15:13Charles Spence:But I haven't really watched many of his films, actually. And Tarantino uses Counterpoint quite a lot as well. Yeah. Again, sort of violence and the pleasant stuff. And then the other one I came across, I forget the name of the film, but we all know as a kind of an auditory auditory light motif sort of it's Jaws ah yes it's almost like an audio branding that's got to be in the film but it's got to be this little auditory sequence of notes means Jaws means danger there because they didn't have the whatever they didn't have the the mechanotronics for the Jaws in time so they had to use the sound in its place and in some film some comedy and that was what 50 years ago it came out was it 77 I think Peter Bentley so those had the 50th anniversary of Jaws a few months ago yeah but even though we haven't seen the film for a long time we still remember that sound is ominous and some contemporary film has a scene where there's a young boy and a what do they call them an old a dangerous older woman in the swimming pool and she rips off his they both get into the pool and then she rips off his swing trunks and this is played with the Jaws music so it's kind of cross-referencing and then you get all the connotations and associations and you think that makes me think well I haven't got the answer to it yet but how could you then apply that in a dining context to go beyond what we've been doing for years which is just finding music to match what you're eating to say no.

1:16:57Is there a culinary counterpoint? What would that be? That's kind of something to explore as a... Culinary counterpoint, interesting.

1:17:07Charles Spence:Yeah, very interesting. I went to, and I don't think this is a culinary counterpoint, but I went to Sat Baines' restaurant, RSB and Nottingham. He was on the podcast last week. And I think it is using setting as a counterpoint. Have you been to RSB? No, no, no. Okay, so again, it's kind of a juxtaposition. he says and it's kind of a bit tongue-in-cheek we are a working class two-star restaurant but you go um and i always say i always say it was like entering gastronomic narnia right so you go over this flyover which is just like a um you know like a nottingham it's very industrial uh the the pylons you've got these big pylons which you know you you feel like it's a very very industrial the walls are covered in graffiti you go down this little lane and it's literally just on basically a roundabout, a very busy roundabout.

1:17:58Charles Spence:And so you're going thinking, fucking hell, where are we going? And I remember when we pulled up, there was this blue light from the police who pulled someone over. So you do not feel like you're going there. But that counterpoint of that context, and then you enter this Gastron McNarnia, and there there's rabbits running around. And I do believe it's so important for that restaurant. Yeah. And others too would be sort of Joseph Fusev when he was in High Barnet, which building it was, and that was a graffiti-covered metal lift that kind of clacked up the three floors and all the way in. It was horrible, and what are we doing here?

1:18:33And then you open the door, and suddenly you have this fabulous meal through to the Spanish chefs of El Celo de Canroca. Again, it's sort of an industrial bit of Girona. That's sort of the idea, again, that there is this kind of contrast on the outside, which maybe makes the, or even the alchemist, there are no signs for the alchemist at all. And he's wandering down the, I guess most people come by taxi. Where's that? Where's the alchemist? The one in Copenhagen, two miles further along from the Noma restaurant on the outskirts of town. And I guess most people go by taxi. I'm too tight, so I walked my meal.

1:19:18And then the pavings disappear, and it's just like a mud track and these big shipbuilding buildings in the background. Are we in the right place? And there's no signs, there's nothing. God, I wish we'd got a taxi here and I don't have a phone so I can't check where it is. And then there's just a door. It's a massive door with sort of bronze, like some sort of Florentine church. And you arrive and you're not at all what you expected, entirely inconsistent with the background and then seven and a half hours, you kind of come out the door again. Wow. Yeah.

1:19:55Charles Spence:The, what was I going to say? Sorry, the link between storytelling, cinema storytelling and restaurants. I think you've told the story that maybe there's a restaurant in Japan where they pick you up in some random gaff. They blindfold you. That's one example. Just talk through that example. Then I'd love to know that any other weird restaurants, you know, where they can really almost take principles of, you know being blindfolded in a random car is would be an amazing opening scene to a film it's also an amazing opening experience for restaurant like talk me through that bit and then any any other parallels yeah uh so yes that's chef pauper in ultraviolet in shanghai yeah oh sorry yeah yeah um and yeah pick up the guests uh and so you know it's really a bit of when does your experience start and end?

1:20:45And if you can curate the end bits, maybe you have a better overall experience. And so you're picked up in a minibus and who knows who you're with and then there'll be the other, I think they've got a little like they do in Asia, these sort of screen inside the minibus playing something, but that's kind of related to your experience and then taken eventually to this, I guess, nondescript location where all the show begins with the projections on the walls and scents and costumes and everything. So a nice way of prolonging the experience, curating a journey that I do think others could learn from.

1:21:30I mean, I'm just doing something at the moment about sort of a travel or particularly a plane flight. And they sort of think, I mean, when does your journey begin and end? And if you're going first class or business class somewhere in a long haul, they can sort of do what they do only on the aeroplane, but the before and after, is it out of their control? But it's sort of so often so bad. How could they, yeah, if they thought about the journey starting earlier, then you might be able to design the experience differently to actually create a first-class experience that should be from door to door, not just from boarding the plane to getting off.

1:22:11Charles Spence:Because that's Daniel Kahneman's peak-end rule, isn't it? Which is how the experience ends is more important than the peak and the end. Because I think a lot of restaurants get that bit right. Like, they think about how the experience ends. Even last night I was in a curry house, they give you an after eight, right? It's that little thing. But I always think, and I don't know, this is my bastardised behavioural science, basically. but is there a front-end rule almost, which is the same thing to the point about the aeroplanes? It doesn't start when you're at the airport. It starts when you probably book the thing.

1:22:44Charles Spence:Is that something you think about? So is that actually a thing, the front-end rule? Does that just mean... No, I mean... What do you think? So you might think the rise of sharing plates and tasting menus is all around that, you know, sort of the first bite standing out, maybe the last bite and the best bite, but the rest is wasted. Yeah. So there's no point having a big meal or a big course of something because it'll be lost to memory. So if you're trying to create the sticky, or the stiction, the sticky experiences, then make sure the first and the end and the best. And by having lots of small courses, you can have a lot more firsts and ends, potential high points, than just with a three-course meal.

1:23:25So that's why,

1:23:26Charles Spence:do you think that's why the sharing plate things? Yeah. In part, and tasting menus, because that gives you more touch points. Yep. So there's a starting and end for each dish, a starting and end for the whole meal, and then a starting and end for the whole experience from booking or checking online and the reviews and such like. My favourite way of curating that is probably from the Fat Duck years ago where they would book your table months in advance and then whatever week or two before they'd say, send your card. Don't forget, you've got a booking with Heston two weeks from today. They've already taken 25 % of my money, so I was never going to forget.

1:24:12It's once in a lifetime. That's why they're doing that. But that wasn't the point. The point was that the card was fragranced with the smell of a sweet shop.

1:24:19Charles Spence:Oh, so they sent you a card? Yeah. Oh, like an actual... Yeah, letter. Oh, sorry, you meant like a credit card? No, no, a real card to say, don't forget your booking. but the point wasn't to remind you but the point was just give you that first smell the journey starts here in a way and then when you arrived at the restaurant a week or two later as you walked through the front door somebody would have rubbed the door frame with the smell of the sweet shop kind of a nostalgic, a happier, liked smell again and then at the end of the meal you get sent home with a bag of sweeties a chocolate playing card and then that extends your experience out the other end.

1:24:58I think the same thing for a project in Jamaica with a multi-sensory hotel resort. And there I worked with an artist to create the fragrance of the resort that, again, people would be sent home from the holiday with a bottle of the perfume of the resort. And again, you get all the Proustian memories as a way of extending the experience as for those when people who ate their chocolates from the fat duck a month after. It's still a living part.

1:25:28Charles Spence:Because the Proustian thing is the smell of Madeleines, isn't it? Yeah, interesting. Because what was that? Did he just like the smell of Madeleines? Well, he just takes it back at some point. How did he become, why did Marcel Proust become so synonymous with that? Because in whatever, I remember some things past as a scene where the character is given a cup of Linden tea and a biscuit on Madeleine. in fact it wasn't going to be a Madeleine but in the final version it was and that takes him back to his grandmother decades before okay so that's like your diesel smell with your grandmother yeah okay yeah yeah and so so I think this resort did it well to give you that smell to relive the experience afterwards and things you can do at the beginning or before it starts start earlier and after it ends to prolong it because Probably the experience itself is pretty short and lots of the pleasure may come in the anticipation and then the remembering.

1:26:29And then if you have the actual experience designed with sort of this sort of stiction with these...

1:26:37Charles Spence:So is it variable schedule reward theory? Like, you know, when you vary the amount of stuff you're giving people, like it's basically the... Slop machines. Slop machines, exactly. How does that play out in restaurants? I don't know. I suppose all those sharing plate restaurants, what have I ever written, two or three plates each, and then they'll come when the chef's ready. And then it's a variable reward. Well, that's it. Maybe that's why Wagwan was so forward-thinking in the sense that the food comes whenever you're ready. It breaks all the sort of category codes, and you're on a table next to people who you've never met before.

1:27:19Charles Spence:Interesting. so there's counterpoint any other lessons from cinema that you think could be really interesting for restaurants

1:27:30the other thing that is interesting is this notion of diegetic

1:27:34Charles Spence:and non-diegetic sound what's that? if you're watching the film and you hear some theme music you don't think that's part of the you don't think the characters can hear that yeah that would be sort of non-diegetic whereas other sounds, if your characters walk into a noisy bar and you hear some thumping music, that would be diegetic. You think that music is part of the story and the characters can hear that thing. So there are two kinds, and it's used differently.

1:28:03So how could you make the music in restaurants part of the story rather than just the background music? Make it diegetic, not non-diegetic. And then is there a way in Blazing Saddles, a movie? Mel Gibbs Gibson is it

1:28:21Charles Spence:Blazing Saddles Mel Brooks Mel Brooks 1988 or something like that comedy and it starts Blazing Saddles it's about was it cowboys and stuff and it starts out in the in the wild west dusty stuff with it with the cowboys and the horses and the background is some famous who was it some famous, not Louis Armstrong, but somebody like that. Anything that's non-diegetic. The characters can't hear this jazz music. And then the camera pans round, and there is Louis Armstrong, whoever it was, actually playing in the middle of the Wild West. Wow. Sort of a playful switch from non-diegetic to diegetic. and so are some of these sort of tricks things that could be in any way translated to the culinary setting as well?

1:29:29And the other ones, you know, sort of using mood music is very often how the music is used in film and I guess that is used intuitively already in the dining context. So some things are already there. Others like this notion of the leitmotif of the jaws. Could that be? Interesting. If you served your seafood with that rather than the sounds of the sea, does it get you somewhere interesting or whatever?

1:30:00Charles Spence:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are these sort of auditory leitmotifs or distinctive? how can you use that to take people and tell stories or just think definitely we'll go beyond just, well, we're going to pair the same, the music that matches the food. No, it is fascinating. My mate's got a restaurant called Black Bear Burger in London and he's ardently, we play hip-hop for, he believes, and i kind of do believe this but hip-hop is the best food to eat really like big juicy burger too um they opened in westfield in shepherd's bush obviously way more family orientated couldn't put the um hip-hop on because the parents like this you know swearing and whatnot and even he was saying that the the vibe of the restaurant is so so different i think now circumvented that by having like a non-explicit hip-hop but like it is really interesting how the sound when you put suddenly change a sound to or playlist to your restaurant it completely changes the experience the um so with Heston so you work with him why was he what what's why was he such a genius first and then second like what's maybe underrated about him or what what most slightly different side to him only you'd understand by spending so much time with him

1:31:31I think what struck me was open mindedness and curiosity to learn but to learn from unconventional sources so back in whatever it was over 20 years ago now we were put in touch by a Swiss flavour house who we were both working with separately said you two should meet and got my invitation to the FATAC, and that was great. But then he'd come up to Oxford to see my lab, but also to other departments to see other professors and just the curiosity about what's going on and knowledge, and that seemed to be pretty unique, something I think that Chef Joseph Yusuf does these days as well. He will talk to the surgeon, like Therodja Kneebone.

1:32:22Why? Well, that's nothing to do with cooking. Well, no, in fact, the surgeon in charge of his team in the operating theatre is also cutting and chopping and dicing, just as the chef is doing with his team or her team. So there's sort of parallels there about, you know, and was it mise en place, setting all your tools out for service, be it in the surgery or in the restaurant. So all these similarities, I forget which of the two of them, Joseph or Heston, would be talking to people like wallpaper designers. Again, another bizarre sort of left field thing.

1:32:58Charles Spence:Yeah. Well, why because they've got some interesting insights about how they design, how they create, that could spark something. And I would say I hadn't come across many chefs before anyway, but since then haven't come across many who have the time or the interest to look outside traditional sources of inspiration. Sir John Hegarty, the big marketing advertising guy, says originality comes from obscure sources. So I often think looking at cross-categories, and Heston's arguably the most creative and original chef of the century, really. But it's interesting to say he's going to speak to wallpaper designers, all these weird, yeah, mad.

1:33:45And, yeah, there were, what, a film at some point, some Californian, was it, film creatives or director or something coming over to sort of then think about how to score a meal like a film and stuff. And so there's openness to lots of different – and a sort of hunger for lots of different things. And then having sufficient time to be able to sort of turn that into something magical. And for me, I'd spent a number of years working with big food companies and they'd have their test kitchens and we'd show them the science and this is what the results show. if you redesign your thing this way it should be better and more tastier or uh and then they'd go away and make something in the kitchens and it'd be like horrible you could sort of see the science was in there but it wasn't desirable or and i think these sort of top chefs have the ability to take the things that they're interested in as a source of inspiration um and then create the magical the memorable um and do it very potentially very quickly for me i spent the first 15 years working on car warning signals and technology for drivers.

1:34:53And they've got the perfect result for a car company. It'd be 20 years before that result made it into a car you could buy in the high street because of the timescales of information and process. Whereas with a chef, if they like an idea, then it could be next month. You have something on the menu that... And that was it. And that sort of led then to things like the Sound of the Sea dish. We had a festival here, an Oxford Art and Science Festival in 2006, or seven and 150 people had paid their money and expected to hear him and me and taste something we had nothing ready the day or two before so he brought up a van of oysters and some bacon and egg ice cream that was popular at the time in his restaurant and we split the audience in two and played sizzling bacon sounds or farm yard chicken sounds for the ice cream and bizarrely it flipped the flavour what do you mean as in the bacon-y flavour was much more intense with the sizzling bacon sounds and the eggy flavour of the ice cream was much more intense with the...

1:35:52And then we did the sounds of the sea while eating the oysters versus, I think, probably the farm yard chickens again or something else. And again, the oysters tasted it, were rated as a completely nicer, but no more salty, listening to the sounds of the sea. So I was like, something done at the last minute out of desperation. We never thought it would work, but we had to do something with these 150 people, and it did work. And then we had the team to go back to Bray and a month or two later come back with The Sound of the Sea Dish that became Signature Dish. It's still there 20 years later on the menu.

1:36:28Great. And then through that, along with Joseph these days in London, I'll say there are these amazing illusions, like the duck-rabbit illusion or all these other amazing things in visual textbooks, visual perception textbooks. What's the duck-rabbit illusion? It's like something from the 1890s, just a line drawing, and it looks either like a duck or like a rabbit and the beak of the duck can be the ears of the rabbit.

1:36:51Charles Spence:Oh, I've seen this. I've seen this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd say, couldn't we make like an edible illusion? Is that the same one when you've got the two faces in and it's a wine glass? Have you seen that? That could be, I think it's the Reuben vase, I think. Okay. It looks like, yeah. Another version, you can see one thing or the other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a number of these illusions that flip, they're all visual. So I sort of showed them to Joseph and say you could make a culinary version of that because it would be cool to have an edible illusion. And a couple of the dishes came out. He made a duck rabbit one because they're sustainable ingredients.

1:37:22And we have a plate that you could rotate to make it more duck-like or more rabbit-like with music that he'd sourced of Looney Tunes with it's duck season, it's rabbit season, it's duck season, rabbit season. Oh, wow. So it triggers nostalgia. And you've got what you're hearing going back and forth, duck rabbit, duck rabbit. What you're seeing on the plate, duck rabbit, duck rabbit. And our question was whether you could then flip the flavour of the dish that it would taste more duck-like. Crazy. We see on her duck. Another one that's like a Picasso dish, which is a great one, which just looks like red splotches.

1:37:56But in fact, it's a picture of Picasso. And you can't see it to begin with. Only four out of 100 diners can see it. And then after a while, suddenly everyone can see it on 96. And you can hear going around the restaurant.

1:38:09Charles Spence:Ah! And then people trying to explain it to each other. and this is, you know, and once you can see Picasso in the plate, you can't believe you could not have seen it before. It's kind of gastroporn. It's got a sonic seasoning sort of sound state of a duck being chased and then chopped. Gastroporn. Yeah. Tell me more about that. Yeah. What is it? That's just sort of people's fascination with beautiful images of food. Gastroporn, food porn would be, you know, term probably first captured in 1970s. Yeah. I think with these kind of cookbooks, with Nouvelle Cuisine, with these delicious-looking plates of food, and now kind of gone bonanza with all the social media and people, food porn, and one of the most things searched for terms on the internet.

1:38:57And then all the food television everywhere and mukbang. It's just that interest in and desire to create beautiful-looking food images, whether or not they taste good.

1:39:11Charles Spence:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the link with nature, when we're in nature and art, and then we can use that as a context to explore the beauty, the gastroporn? So when we look at art or when we look at a beautiful vista like your home in Colombia, how are they similar? How are they different? um so probably only the uh well it depends what the art is portraying um but maybe that is i would say sort of uh potentially uplifting maybe viewing art and uh makes us have bigger grander thoughts and um maybe connects us um the nature might do the same thing but simply also triggering biophilia and allowing us to recover our mental resources.

1:40:05Charles Spence:Is that what nature does? Yep. So it seems like, you know, and it can be real nature or it can be digital nature. It can be a plastic plant or a real tree, it doesn't seem to matter. And it can be the sight of nature, the blues and greens of water and plants. It can be the smell of nature, maybe. It can be the sounds of nature, water, birds, and the more bird species you can hear, the more relaxed and recovered you'll feel after and for me being a multi-sensory scientist it's all about well how can you combine those sensory elements to give the biggest sort of mental boost and was about 2003 I did a big report for ICI the secret of the senses and sort of biophilia this you know the beneficial effects of being in nature was kind of new area it's really hard to believe some of the findings they were suggesting that patients recover if your hospital bed looks out at nature rather than the brick wall and roll clocks forward when I did my sense hacking book in 2021 I revisited all the nature effect literature and it's just grown exponentially and the beneficial effects it could be just your screen saver when you turn your computer on that's got a beautiful natural scene and staring at that for a few seconds will probably improve your performance.

1:41:22Apple always do. They always have, I think it was like Yosemite or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. And so, sort of amazing and I can sort of feel it myself in the garden in Columbia when it's, all the senses are stimulated and with lots of birds and lots of water features now and lots of fragrant plants and either, some people say it's just connection to nature full stop, makes us feel more, others would say, well, no, So the more the nature environment mirrors the Ethiopian highlands where we evolved, the happier we will be. And so that's why, for example, when people study, go from North America, this is Justin and colleagues in 2019, they went from the hottest to the coldest state in North America, from Alaska to Texas, and asked people, how do you set your thermostat and humidity in the home?

1:42:20Regardless of the temperature of the state, it turned out that everyone set the same humidity and temperature pretty much. Oh, wow. And then you say, look at world climate charts and say, where in the world is it most similar to what people choose for their own homes? And it's the Ethiopian highlands of all the climates on the earth. And so then the suggestion is we're picking our own homes to try and make them like the environments we evolved in. And then so the nature environment, it might trigger that. it might be that if you walk down the street in London or on a tube you're always having to judge, sort of move aside from people and judge are you going to the left or the right can I cross the road now or not and that takes a lot of attention to constantly monitor for threats whereas in nature that's kind of just endlessly fascinating but doesn't really require us to really pay attention, we can just sort of let ourselves go and that allows us to recharge our mental batteries it suggested

1:43:17Charles Spence:Yeah, because I feel like cities are amazing, but they're also quite taxing on your central nervous system because you're just, as you say, especially in London, like I feel like even coming up here and walking on the street here, it's just like, do you know what I mean? Whereas walking through London, which I've been where I live, it's just mad. It's like a mental... And so this is more and more research showing the beneficial effects, even with short-term exposure. We did, I've been on the radio saying even if you lunch hour rather than trying to get outside and a bit of nature will have a beneficial effect on your performance later in the day.

1:43:50You know, a nice project with southwestern trains. We've got a new quiet carriages.

1:43:56Charles Spence:They're amazing. So that train, when I used to live back home in Surrey, I used to get that train in, and it was just so outdated, rackety as fuck. Like it was just, the new trains they've got were the new, so they've gone from that red and orange and blue colour to this just like nice soft blue, but the inside is insane. What's happened with that? Yeah, I don't know what engineering-wise they've done for it, but they knew they got the new quieter train, but then sort of how do you work with that? So we worked with them and had commuters going on a tour around London and we had them listening to their favourite podcast or music for 15, 20 minutes or sitting there quietly for 20 minutes, enjoying the quietness of the train or 15 to 20 minutes with nature soundscapes that were specially designed.

1:44:52And people felt much more relaxed with the nature soundscapes than with their own or with anything else. I just wanted to go up and down the carriage as we were running it. I could just see people in the nature conditions sort of beatific with their eyes closed, smiling, relaxed, almost asleep. And you could just see the nature effect right there. And yeah, and that can sort of then help to be deliberately incorporated. So the Southwest trains and has a whole range of nature soundscapes you can listen to for the journeys that work with the technological innovation. And so this is all going on.

1:45:23We can build it into our own lives. We've now done research showing that if you are doing any kind of shopping online, if you have nature soundscapes, you make more sustainable, healthier choices, be it for food, be it for timeshares, for travel or another stuff.

1:45:36Charles Spence:Wow. They're sort of nudging us in a good way. and also parallel given the interest in restaurants i was kind of curious why of these chefs who are playing with technology and trying to create atmospheres and environments and contexts in their restaurants like ultraviolet in shanghai like joseph use of in kitchen theory or heston with the sounds of the sea why do they always seem to go for nature heston has the sounds of the sea on the seaside joseph will have the forest floor with the smell of the jasmine after its rain, with the sounds of the forest, with the projections of the greens of the trees.

1:46:10And again and again, it seemed the chefs were choosing to recreate nature. They could have chosen to recreate the city centre, outer space, underwater, but it's always got nature, nature, nature. Then this last year's Restaurant of the Year in the UK or something, it was a Vietnamese restaurant in London, I think, but the picture shows a whole wall of like a living wall of plants.

1:46:32Charles Spence:Wow. It's nature again. uh so we just did a paper with one of my students uh my uca just looking at this and saying maybe the chefs have intuitively picked up that by having nature in their restaurants that will not only make people more relaxed trigger the nature effect so people will enjoy their experience more yeah it may also be congruent and convey notions of naturalness in the food and um uh and that that idea can then be extended of course to hospitality to hotels and how do you or to workplaces and um yeah interesting why what's going on when we go into spas like why humans when did the spa thing start and why have you always been because we had the roman spas in bath what's what's happening century i kind of get it from going on myself from the science side of it um so these days well we might say uh our skin's our biggest sensory organ 18 to 22 percent of mass is just our skin sheet full of receptors but we kind of ignore it mostly, we don't think about stimulating our sense of touch in the way that we do stimulate our ears with music and our nose with fragrance and flavours and so on and that's important because our skin is full of all sorts of receptors for temperature, for pressure, for vibration for recently discovered pleasure receptors in the hairy skin that love being stroked at 5 to 10 a centimetre to the second that release opioids into the skin and pleasure sort of stuff.

1:48:01And yet in today's society, we're living with what Tiffany Fields calls a touch hunger. Parents won't touch children for fear of litigation. No one wants to touch older people as we get into the older population. You can't touch in the workplace. So sort of interpersonal touch is sort of verboten these days. so we're not stimulating the skin as much as perhaps we should. And hence we maybe fulfill that need for touch through going to the sharper image stores in the States and getting massage chairs and scratchy spider things for your head and vibrating chairs for your car and such like. Or you go to a spa, maybe get the tactile stimulation, either from massage but then also through the thermal of the sauna and steam room and that is sort of an important and beneficial thing and then of course you've got the calming music and you've got the nature smells so it's like a multi-sensory experience but maybe a large part making up for the touch hanger

1:49:13Charles Spence:in the and um uh an interesting i mean i sort of just actually just published submitted a paper yesterday with a colleague all about sort of um uh um humidity as um what is humidity and it's going to get much worse as global temperatures rise and it causes all sorts of disease but it's also humidity and temperature used in sort of steam treatments in the victorian era for well-being and also the saunas and spas, you know, sort of interesting space. Normally humidity is really bad, but then we deliberately choose to go into the steam room and expose ourselves to unpleasant levels of... But it's actually pleasurable.

1:49:54How does that work?

1:49:57Charles Spence:Yeah, interesting. What's... With music, so obviously we were recording this before Christmas, in December, as I was driving up this morning, they, I think, put heart Christmas songs on one, feel a bit Christmassy, right? I think that song, Queen, Thank God It's Christmas, came on. I haven't heard it in a couple of years. Yeah. It viscerally, like, palpably punches your soul and this fucking weird feeling's happening. What is happening when we listen to music and that is... Why do humans love music? That's a big question, but, like, any understanding on that? or maybe humans like dancing and it's not me but many humans out here like dancing and music so it's probably the only sense that gives us the sense of wanting to move and of rhythm it's hard to kind of communicate that through other senses by flashing lights or auditory and audition and rhythm and meter and beat kind of go together and even for any little babies if they're sung to will sort of move and in time to the lullabies or the desire to kind of synchronise movement with music.

1:51:13So it sort of brings people together as well. And for the Christmas things, maybe it's an auditory Proust effect in a way. I was going to say, yeah, it's the Madelines for your ear.

1:51:31Charles Spence:Yeah, interesting.

1:51:36That's fine. But then sometimes it will annoy you when stores use it. Christmas, you can't get away from it, blasting out Christmas songs and you feel like you're being manipulated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It turns a bit in the context, but we did one project years ago where we had Mr Kipling's mince pies and we had the smell of Christmas, the cloves and the cinnamon and the oranges, with the sight of Christmas with the fir tree and snow and flashing lights and the sounds as well. So a multi-sense of Christmas. It definitely made people want to eat more mince pies. Yeah, of course. By stimulating the different senses.

1:52:25And, yeah, it just takes us, I guess...

1:52:29Charles Spence:Yeah, I think the best way is the Proustian effect for your earbuds. Yeah, for your... And then by taking us back, then it triggers the same feelings we had and memories and nostalgia and warm feeling of that time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A couple more things and we'll wrap this up. I'm actually loving our conversation, Charles. what do you think are some of the most overrated and also underrated um kind of hacks people can do to improve the experience of their restaurant uh yeah well i uh yeah uh sick to death of the sharing plates and it'll come when it's when it'll come uh so that's overrated i think but maybe it's effective um why do you what's why are you sick to death of that because it's so i don't on trend and they're all doing it and we've got a new concept.

1:53:28It's called sharing plates. They just make me buy more. I can't get away from it. Not another restaurant with a sharing plate concept. How does it manipulate you, the sharing plates? You end up buying more. Because it's actually giving you less food. Yeah, more dishes and then you can't – it takes it out of your control when they might all come at the same time. I don't want them starter, I don't want them main course. and I don't want to share it, in fact, with them. I ordered the spicy one. I want the spicy one not to. So there's all kinds of wrong for me.

1:54:04And I do think so many chefs focus just on the food and that's like it. And they don't think about the music that's playing. They don't think about necessarily how important naming the dishes is.

1:54:20And the weight of the cutlery. I would say one of the simplest hacks is just to give people heavier cutlery and it makes food taste better.

1:54:27Charles Spence:What about the naming of the dishes? This isn't the Patagonian Toothfish. Yep. They changed that to Chilean Seabass. Same thing. Yep, and 1 ,200 % increase in documented sales in UK, North America, and Australia. So it's Patagonian Toothfish. To Reds, Reds, yeah, sorry, Chilean Seabass. Chilean Seabass. Chilean Seabass. And I think everyone's probably ordered the sea bass, and it sounds nicer, but the same thing. It's sustainable and healthy. Any other examples of that?

1:54:59That might be probably the best one. I would say people at home, you know, often when you cook, again, it's thinking about the ingredients and the cooking times and stuff, and you don't think about what it's going to be called. But when you go on the airplane and they just say, you know, chicken or fish, you've lost me already. It's never going to taste good. That's all you can think to say about it. the other one I'm interested in at the minute is that my brother's got a restaurant just on the outskirts of town these days, Wharton Kitchen Garden, and he had a dish for Chinese New Year called crispy duck salad for the Chinese audience but it's sold out and he's kept it on the menu ever since and what's going on with that, why has that been such a big seller?

1:55:41I'm sure it's about the name, is it, you know, the salad makes it sound healthy but then duck makes it sound nice

1:55:45Charles Spence:is it a crispy crispy descriptor so what I'd like to do is put it on the menu this week and then the next week take the crispy bit off and see how much but I think that sensory descriptor is playing a huge role I think that's really important with brands in supermarkets is using taste descriptive words I think Causton Press do it really well like mouthwatering but like using taste descriptive words on pack is really a great way to get that storytelling and pull. And clearly increases sales, not just of the Pataconian toothfish, but Chilean sea bass, but also, you know, you're trying to get people to eat more vegetables and calling them zingy, twisted, dynamite beets and zingy, twisted carrots.

1:56:32But works much better than saying healthy or good for you or something like that. Yeah.

1:56:40And, yeah. Obviously things can go too far and get pretentious, but thinking a bit more carefully about just the importance of naming. And if my brother ever lets me experiment with his guests with the crispy thing, then how you could use that and which other dishes could become bestsellers simply by Crispy the Crunchy, the Crackly, the Sizzlin' the sizzling bacon

1:57:16Charles Spence:it's yeah on that note we'll wrap this up but someone always says sell the sizzle not the bacon and I think that's no no no they don't say that at all sell the sizzle not the steak it's a steak that sells the sizzle not the steak I thought it was sell the sizzle not the bacon no interesting and you can still see actually I've got a little clip available online of Alma Wheeler I thought it was sell the sizzle not the bacon and that's hilarious um i've absolutely loved our conversation thank you so much absolute pleasure and my brain is just exploding with wisdom thank you thank you so so much for listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if you like that episode only if you liked it please do give it five stars subscribe tell all your friends families foes next door but one cat dog whatever please tell everyone about this podcast it means the world to me and i really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on linkedin search dan pope and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands thank you so much