Questions on My Mind about the Psychology of Air and Aroma
- How can we be neurologically affected by smells? There are fragrances and odours that actually change brain function. Ex., lavender is a chemical. Not only does it smell sweet and make you feel calm, it's a chemical that can, in fact, induce slow wave sleep in animals.
- How can we be psychologically affected by smells?
- Are there such things as healthy vs unhealthy smells?
- How can scent be used to make people better breathers? Deeper breaths
- How has scent been used in retail and marketing? Olfactory marketing
- How can the scents that we wear influence how people think about us?
- How nice smelling places hinder our health?
- How can nice smelling places help our health?
- What studies have been done on the long term effects of dwelling in a nice smelling space?
- What studies have been done on the long term effects of dwelling in a bad smelling space?
- What options do we have for making our spaces smell nice? Which of them are the most / least healthy?
- Where are the best smelling oases in the world?
- Are the health benefits of smells only gained by those with a decent sense of smell?
- What would a ranking of my favourite smells look like?
- Is fresh air on the farthest part of the positive spectrum or is it in the middle? Maybe fresh air is anything in the positive side of the spectrum.
- Is there a more beneficial air quality than fresh? — free from negative agents
- What if we walked around with an air quality monitor to tell us when to and not to take in deep breaths?
- Is there a mineral air version of mineral water?
- How can we create scent memories?
- Are there any health benefits to holding our breath?
- Can we simulate the concept of air pollution using water and food colouring?
- How does air quality change depending on elevation and altitude?
- How does air quality change depending on weather?
- How does air quality change depending on location within a city?
- Are people who breathe properly more susceptible to the air pollution in a city?
- If you had to pick one of your senses to lose?
- Smells are complex mixtures of molecules. How do those molecules interact with our neurology?
- What if I had learned chemistry through perfumery? Imagine having had the option where instead of chemistry class, you had: the science of perfumery or the science of cooking.
- Do movie theatres use scent marketing? If not could they benefit from it? What if they really went all in with the smell of popcorn and tried wafting it as far as they could. Like leading customers in with a trail of popcorn scented breadcrumbs.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns_3My8xoJg
- There’s a link between the smell of clean and moral character
- It can make us behave better if we’re placed in an environment that smells like cleaning products
- In another study, people were more willing to volunteer or donate money to charity if the room that they were sitting in was sprayed down with citrus scented windex
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnWfdT0uBM4
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgPoLM3E-VA
- Our ability to sense a specific odour does not necessarily eliminate the chemical signal sent to our brain. Which means that even if we can’t smell something, it still has the ability to affect us
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsDsUaIU81M
- Creating bottled biographies
- Using scent to teleport our imaginations back into a specific environment
- Sent marketing
- Scented ads
- Ambient coffee scent can increase feeling of alertness
- Museum of Feelings NYC, 2015
- Wine Museum France, 2016
- Real estate and baked cookies
- Olfactory adaptation
- Arsenic and marzipan both smell like almonds; arsenic and almonds don’t have the same molecular shape, but they do vibrate at a similar frequency; leading to a newer vibrational theory of smell, as opposed to the more widely accepted shape theory
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmGLsMER58g
- Smell and taste and airplane environment due to altitude
- Link between smell and appetite
- Diet aromatherapy
- Scent memory; a smell is worth a thousand pictures
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nh_vxpycEA
- The air quality in office environments and the negative effects on workers
- Stale air
- In addition to improving memory, smell can also enhance the effectiveness of ad visuals. For example, Krishna, Morrin, and Sayin showed that scent in printed food ads increases individuals' physiological (i.e. salivation), evaluative (i.e. desire to eat), and consumptive (i.e. amount eaten) responses to the ads. Thus, a scratch-and-sniff strip can benefit ads, provided the strip reproduces the actual food smell. Interestingly, this research also showed how ads can induce people to 'imagine smells' ('smellizing') and how olfactory imagery can have effects similar to those of actual smell. Consumers who were shown a picture of chocolate chip cookies, and were asked to imagine the smell, salivated much more than consumers who were shown the picture but were not asked to imagine the smell.
I think Disney is the most fascinating example of this. They pump out the scent of vanilla on Main Street to entice you to buy ice cream, they pump out the scent of saltwater in the area surrounding Pirates of the Caribbean to get you to go on the ride, and all their popcorn stands pump out the smell of buttery popcorn to get you to buy a bag. And those are just the examples I can think about. Disney is an expert on using scents to attract their customers
My mum used to work at a small coffee shop and they would roast and grind coffee and pump it through the extractor fan in the morning and it would bring people in big time.
• Gardens to bloom at different times of year, scent scape