![]() ![]() Naturally, this signal becomes slightly misguided when it reinforces the quality of a potato chip, a processed slab of empty calories. “The fresher the produce, like apples, celery, or lettuce, the more vitamins and nutrients it’s retained. “Noisy foods correlate with freshness,” he says. It may have been a small study, but in the virtually non-existent field of sonic chip research, it was groundbreaking.įor Spence, the results speak to what he considers the inherent appeal of crunchy foods. The duplicitous sounds resulted in a radical difference in chip perception. At loud volumes, the chips were reported to be fresher chips ingested while listening at low volume were thought to have been sitting out longer and seemed softer. What they didn’t know was that Spence had been playing with the feedback in their headphones, raising or lowering the volume of their noisy crunching. ![]() The sound of their crunching was looped back into a pair of headphones.Īfter consuming the cans, they were asked if they perceived any difference in freshness or crispness from one Pringle to another. He asked 20 research subjects to bite into 180 Pringles (about two cans) while seated in a soundproof booth in front of a microphone. To keep a semblance of control, he selected Pringles, which are baked uniformly-a single Pringle doesn't offer any significant difference in size, thickness, or crunch from another. In 2003, Spence decided to investigate the sonic appeal of chips in a formal setting. But we don’t like soggy crisps even if they taste the same. “Noise doesn’t give a benefit in terms of nutrition. “We’re not born liking noisy foods,” he tells Mental Floss. Food companies have enlisted him and consulted his research across the spectrum of ingestion, from packaging to shapes to the sound chips make rustling around in grocery carts. The science of crunch has long intrigued Charles Spence, Ph.D., a gastrophysicist and professor of experimental psychology and head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford. But why is it so satisfying to create a cacophony of crunch? And if we love it so much, why do some of us actually grow agitated and even aggressive when we hear someone loudly chomping away? It turns out there’s a lot more to eating with our ears than you might have heard. Psychologically, our lust for crispy sustenance is baked in. When we don’t-as in the case of Magnum bars, or a soggy, muted potato chip-we resort to other senses, looking at our food with doubt or sniffing it for signs of expiration. ![]() (Normal conversations are around 60 dB rustling leaves, 20 dB.) Depending on the snack, the noise can reach 63 decibels. Humans love crunchy, noisy snacks, that loud rattling that travels to our inner ear via air and bone conduction and helps us identify what it is we’re consuming. “For non-gustatory, non-olfactory stimulation, people prefer crunchiness,” he tells Mental Floss. refers to it as the “music of mastication,” an auditory accompaniment to the sensory stimulus of eating. Smell and taste researcher Alan Hirsch, M.D. ![]() Deprived of hearing the coating collapse and crumble, the experience of eating the ice cream was fundamentally changed. While the updated bar didn’t make a mess, it also didn’t make the distinctive crackle that its fans had grown accustomed to. Instead, they got more complaints than before. When they tested the new and improved product, they expected a warm reception. Unilever reacted by changing the recipe to make the chocolate less prone to spills. The problem, respondents said, was that the chocolate coating of the bars tended to fall off too quickly, creating blotches of sticky goo on carpeting. A number of years ago, food giant Unilever polled consumers asking how the company might improve their popular line of Magnum ice cream bars. ![]()
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