And did they add that because it made the drink taste sweeter?

We'll never know for sure.

But as far as I can trace the story back, I mean, actually, it's probably Louis Cheskin, Madison Avenue's marketing magician, who put it there, along with the golden breasts of McDonald's.

So a very sort of Freudian take on things.

And he was doing studies of adding yellow and green to the can of 7-Up and asking consumers what they thought, and that changed the taste.

So it makes sense that red is sweet and round is sweet.

So put those two cues together.

Relaxed,

Do you think it's that because of lack of tools we have or lack in understanding of what those senses do for us or you know we simply do not know how to translate the sensory research into a design practice?

I think there are multiple factors at play that explain kind of the visual dominance that we see in architectural practice, as in pretty much any other area of study, research or investigation, that we are all of us kind of visual creatures.

More of our brains are given over to what we see than to any of our other senses.

Something like more than 50% of the brain's neocortex, the new brain on the outside, is all primarily involved in processing sight.

But only 4% to 10% is involved in processing smells or touch or taste.

so there's a big cortical uh sort of bias towards vision that maybe partly explains why we are such visual creatures um and as we think we imagine visually and hence we tend to create primarily for the eye i guess um and that may be also uh linked to our ability to, I don't know, to talk about and to convey what we have done.

So if we're an architect, the buildings we've created, it's going to be much easier to show in an article or paper or a book kind of what the building looks like or architectural design of the space, but much harder to convey what this space smells like, what it sounds like.

So two things here, right? What's the difference between space that's merely quiet and one that genuinely calm? And given that sound shapes even flavor perception, how should we be thinking about it beyond just reduction?

What are the factors that go into that?

Yeah.

So, um, I guess my, my food research, I wasn't initially interested in studying food because that's...

I was interested in the senses, and I would be doing lots of warning signals work on cars and, um, interface design, and food and flavor was just what kind of what food scientists did, not what psychologists did, um, in my mind and many others.

Uh, and I got sort of dragged into food through Unilever, who were funding the lab at the time, and that led into the sonic chip.

And from there we sort of started moving out, thinking about not just what sound does food make, but also what does it look like? Changing the color of fruit teas, say, um, in order to set people's expectations for flavor.

If you see a, a very bright colored tea, you expect it's gonna have an intense flavor, and a lot of the products on the market 20 years ago didn't.

[laughs] Speaking of AI, do you have any thoughts on how and whether AI is going to be, say, designing new dishes or entire cuisines?

What sort of things can have a high impact and be a quick win for them, Charles?

Um, I guess obviously just turning off the tech.

I've never had a mobile phone in my life, so I can avoid it that way.

Um, but that's a bit of an extreme approach.

Yeah.

I see for the students at a college in Oxford.

Now we have to have special courses for digital detox.

Charles? Shall we start with you? Does it fit

Yeah

... as a great thing.

But in fact, you know, I'm a sort of psychologist by training, and we know that, um, uh, your memory plays tricks on all of us.

And what we remember is not just like a weaker version of what actually happens, but there are kind of systematic, um, biases.

We'll all remember the first part of an experience.

We'll all remember more of the last part, the high point of an experience.

But the middle of it, probably not at all.

Generally.