Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

IS OBJECTIVITY OVERRATED? You may have never heard the term ‘psychophysics’, which is essentially the study of how the neurobiology of perception varies among different species, and how what we see, hear, taste and feel differs from ‘objective’ reality. For instance, different species, as I will soon explain, perceive colour very differently, since receptors in the eyes are sensitised to different parts of the light spectrum. More importantly, our different senses – though we don’t realise this – act in concert; what we see affects what we hear, and what we feel affects what we taste.fn1 A few years ago, the British chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s received a large number of customer complaints, claiming that they had changed the taste of their Dairy Milk brand. They were at first baffled, because the formulation hadn’t been altered for years. However, what they had done was change the shapes of the blocks you would break off a bar, rounding their corners. And smoother shapes taste sweeter. Truly.