Archive for the ‘Perception’ Category

Scent is relatively neglected in terms of how much research and attention the other senses receive. More recently, research has been showing up all sorts of interesting things about smell, such as how our noses adapt to chemicals in the air within twenty minutes (i.e., we can’t smell them anymore).

You have likely experienced the strange phenomenon of having a whole era of your life come flooding into memory when you pass someone with a particular perfume or whiff of hair shampoo. Scent is more entwined with our emotions and memories than we give it credit for, and it operates largely on a purely subconscious level. This is why scent is now becoming a hot area in marketing research.

The picture is for Tom Tykwers movie adaption of Patrick Suskind’s novel, Perfume: Story of a Murderer. More information about the research of scent can be found here.

One morning, a casual looking guy pulls out a violin and starts busking to people emerging from a tube station to go to work. Six classical pieces and 43 minutes later, over 1000 people had passed. Would you have stopped and listened? Probably not – who does? The difference here is that the busker was actually Joshua Bell, a world famous violinist, once a child prodigy, playing on a $3.5m Stradivari, three days after filling Boston’s Symphony Hall for over $100 a seat. Its a perfect experiment to test the strength of recognition, genuine appreciation and values in a different context, with some conformity pressure thrown in too (if everyone else is passing by… then there’s no reason to stop, right?)

So what happened?

Washington Post writup is here – and well worth reading.