Enhancing Multisensory Experiences: Perspectives from the Food & Beverage, and Flavor & Fragrance Industries

This is episode #31 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 27th of April, 2023.

My invited guest this month is Tony Chemero,  a Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Cincinnati (UC), and a primary member of both the Center for Cognition, Action, and Perception and the Strange Tools Research Lab. In his research, both philosophical and empirical, he addresses questions related to nonlinear dynamical modeling, ecological psychology, complex systems, phenomenology, and social cognition. He is the author of more than 100 articles and the books Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009, MIT Press) and, with Stephan Käufer, Phenomenology (2015, Polity Press; second edition, 2021).

In this episode, I asked Tony to introduce the field of econogical psychology and share his views on its potential importance to artificial intelligence (details are provided in the interview notes).

Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- Ecological psychology (definition and importance) vs. traditional cognitive science
- The replication crisis in psychology
- Is ecological psychology a science?
- The concept of affordances: definition matters
- Interpersonal synergies and alignment systems (especially online) and their implication for interface design and AI
- Can AI help us understand one another? Can ecological psychology help us design platforms that support social connections online?
- Ecological psychology and the Metaverse

Tony’s books:
Radical Embodied Cognitive Science:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516471/radical-embodied-cognitive-science/

Phenomenology: An Introduction, 2nd Edition:
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Phenomenology:+An+Introduction,+2nd+Edition-p-9781509540655

This is episode #30 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 23rd of March, 2023. 

A couple of month ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Stephen Fleming, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Royal Society at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, where he leads the Metacognition Group. He is also a Group Leader at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging. The group’s research focuses on understanding the relationship between objective measures (behaviour and brain activity) and subjective experience and metacognition. Steve’s research on metacognition has been recognised by several early career awards including the British Academy Wiley Prize in Psychology (2016), a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology (2018), and the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (2019). He was a previous Executive Director of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2014-2020), and is an editor at the journals PNAS Nexus and Mind and Language. He writes widely for a general audience, including articles for Aeon, New Scientist and Scientific American, and is the author of Know Thyself, a trade book on the science of metacognition.

In the interview, we touched on various aspects of metacognition as well as on its connection to artificial intelligence (details are provided in the notes from the interview).

Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- Metacognition (definition and objective measures)
- Metacognition vs. intelligence
- Strategies to improve our metacognitive awareness and abilities: self-assessment vs. external feedback
- Explainable AI (can metacognition help us design AI that can explain how it reached its decision?)
- Current large language models (GPT-3, chatGPT) and some of their problems
- Social media: how would knowledge of meta-cognition can help us design spaces that support social connections  (and how to reduce misinformation online)
- The promise of artificial therapy
- The objective and the subjective (How should / can objective science make room for the subjective in its own right?)

Steve’s books and lab:

Know Thyself https://www.amazon.com/Know-Thyself-Self-Awareness-Stephen-Fleming/dp/1541672844
The MetaLab http://metacoglab.org/

This is episode #29 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 16th of February, 2023.

A couple of month ago, I had the pleasure to interview Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, a scientist with a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence).  Bernardo is particularly known for his work at the forefront of the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. Covered in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on 'Scientific American,' the 'Institute of Art and Ideas,' the 'Blog of the American Philosophical Association' and 'Big Think,' among others. Bernardo is also the executive director of Essentia Foundation, an information hub that identifies and helps to promote scientific and philosophical work relevant to metaphysical idealism or nondualism. In the interview, we touched on various aspects of these topics as well as on their connection to artificial intelligence (details are provided in the notes from the interview).
Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- Theories of (perception of) reality: what is reality and how we make sense of it
- Content representations explained
- How to make room for the subjective (value, meaning, intention, purpose, etc.) in the physical world
- The false mind-matter dichotomy and its connection to language
- AI, its representation(s) of the world, and its illusions
- Augmented reality
- Approaches to AI
- The tension between science and experience
- How to best investigate experience and the first-person perspective
- How (and even should) we bring the subjective in science?
- The isolation of AI: Consequences of losing the ‘Renaissance Man’

Essentia Foundation: https://www.essentiafoundation.org
Media info here: https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/media.html

This is episode #28 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 26th of December, 2022.

My invited speaker is Dr. Erik Myin, professor of philosophy at the University of Antwerp. He has published extensively on philosophy of mind and cognition, sometimes alone, sometimes with scientists or other philosophers. With Dan Hutto he wrote "Radicalizing Enactivism" and "Evolving Enactivism", both published with MIT Press. In these books, they defend the point that cognition is embodied interaction rather than being necessarily computational or representational. Currently, Erik has just finished writing a co-authored book in Dutch on embodiment and technology, and has started a solo work titled "Of a Different Mind".

The focus of our discussion is REC, the Radical Enactive or Embodied view of Cognition, and the ways in which it departs from traditional intellectual positions. Specifically, Erik debates the idea of contextual mental representations and the fact that one can explain cognition in terms of mental representations inside the brain. Instead, all these ways of representing are embodied, the result of socio-cultural practices.

The second part of the interview covered the future of digital technologies (including immersive technologies like mixed reality and artificial intelligence) — and if/how they can be (re)shaped by embodied cognitive science.

Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- What is REC (the Radical Enactive or Embodied view of Cognition)
- Contentful mental representations and traditional views on cognition
- The normatively of memory and the Information Processing Theory
- The role of REC in the future of technology

Erik Myin’s website:
https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/erik-myin/

This is episode #27 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 17th of November, 2022. 

My invited speaker today is Dr. Mark James, a philosopher and theoretical cognitive scientist who adopts an embodied approach to questions about the development of habits in both individuals and collectives. Specifically, he is interested in how the designed world shapes such habits, and how we can leverage this understanding to address questions of well-being. More recently, Mark has begun researching how psychological flexibility, our ability to switch between habits, is scaffolded by our bodies and environments. Mark hosts the Connectomics podcast, wherein he speaks with theorists and practitioners about the intersection of embodied cognitive science, culture, technology and design. Mark is also a meditator, musician and martial artist, and a lover of good stories.

We started the show talking about his journey in this field and then delved deeper into aspects of Embodied Cognitive Science and its methodologies. We also looked into ways of studying subjective experience scientifically, and debated if subjective experience can be intersubjectively verified. Mark also elaborated Tom Froese’s proposal for an Irruption Theory of Consciousness, a new theory of consciousness that integrates an embodied-enactive account of basic mind with radical formulations of the freedom and efficacy of intentional agency.

The second part of the interview covered the future of digital technologies (including immersive technologies like mixed reality and artificial intelligence) — and if/how they can be (re)shaped by embodied cognitive science. 

Here is the show.

Show Notes:

- Embodied Cognitive Science - definition and methodologies
- The scientific study of subjective experience
- Can subjective experience be intersubjectively verified?
- Tom Froese’s proposal for an Irruption Theory of Consciousness
- The future of digital technologies (including immersive technologies like MR and AI) 

The Connectomics podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/connectomics/id1606319926

www.markmjames.com

This is episode #26 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 29th of September, 2022. 

Today I sat down with Dr. Andrea Macrae, a researcher in the fields of cognitive narratology and stylistics at Oxford Brookes University, in Oxford, England.  She works on literature and on non-literary discourse - most recently the discourse of charity fundraising. In her research she studies the relationships between text, readers' interpretations, and broader socio-cultural narratives and ways of thinking.
Our discussion theme was the discourse of charity fundraising — a timely topic, as we live in a hyperconnected world where everybody fights for our attention. Specifically, we talked about the role of charity fundraising letters and touched on how research within the sector has only recently begun to connect with theories of narrative. This was important to address given some disconnect between the strategies employed by academic philanthropic researchers and charities   on how to measure the engagement with the beneficiary’s story that would eventually drive donation. 
The second part of the interview covered the the future of digital technologies as contributing to storytelling for non-profit fundraising. Although virtual reality (VR) has already started to play an important role in charity fundraising, Andrea believes that traditional fundraising letters are here to stay.

Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- the discourse of charity fundraising and fundraising letters
- some disconnect between the strategies employed by academic philanthropic researchers and charities on how to measure the engagement
- the role of empathy in the context of charity fundraising letters; the shift from individual to ‘universal compassion’
- the future of digital technologies as contributing to storytelling for non-profit fundraising (next 10-20 years)
- engagement with the donors in immersive environments (AR/VR)
- ethical implications of individual’s story as representative of others

Relevant papers:

Andrea Macrae; Small Stories in Charity Fundraising Letters and the Ethics of Interwoven Individualism. Poetics Today 1 June 2022; 43 (2): 219–241.

Link to Dr. Macrae’s professional webpage: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/profiles/staff/andrea-macrae

This is episode #25 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 22nd of September, 2022. 

My invited speaker today is Dr. Aleš Oblak, who identifies himself as a cognitive scientist more than any other field relating to the sciences of the mind. He likes to describe himself as someone who holds somewhat incompatible views about the nature of the human mind: on the one hand, he believes human beings are irreducibly complex and require a qualitative approach; on the other hand, he argues that our behavior can be productively understood by complex machine learning analyses. Currently his work revolves primarily around psychopathology, as a researcher at a psychiatric clinic.

We started the discussion with how he got into this field, then we tried to tackle one of the most important questions: the lack of explicit validation procedures in the phenomenological literature. Aleš described his own method of “consensual validation” and argued for the solution of establishing a shared vocabulary that captures specific aspects of experience — i.e., to describe the experienced (rather than outside) world.

Aleš is also a proponent of a “naturalistic cognitive science”, highlighting the need for methodological pluralism in naturalistic approaches to first-person research. In fact, he calls for more ecological research designs in psychology.

The second part of the interview covered the role of AI in allowing us to collect data, investigate lived experience, simulate different aspects of it, and through it, perhaps come to some universal structures of consciousness. 

Here is the show.

Show Notes:

- the lack of explicit validation procedures in the phenomenological literature
- a method of “consensual validation”
- establishing a shared vocabulary that captures specific aspects of experience
- toward a “naturalistic cognitive science” (methodological pluralism in naturalistic approaches to first-person research)
- a call for more ecological research designs in psychology
- the future of AI in allowing us to collect data, investigate lived experience, simulate different aspects of it, and through it, some universal structures of consciousness

Relevant papers:

A Oblak, A Boyadzhieva, J Bon. Phenomenological properties of perceptual presence: A constructivist grounded theory approach. Constructivist Foundations, 2021

A Oblak. Accusatives, Deixis, and Pointing Fingers. Constructivist Foundations, 2021

Link to Dr. Oblak’s Google Scholar page: 
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=p-HJoNYAAAAJ&view_op=list_works

This is episode #24 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 25th of August, 2022. 

My invited speaker today is Dr. Anna Harris, an anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Society Studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Previously, she worked as a doctor in Australia and the UK. For the past 10 years she has been doing ethnographic studies of medicine.

Her approach to the social study of medicine is grounded in ethnographic studies of contemporary medical practices, to which she adds her clinical experience working in hospitals, as well as collaborations with historians, doctors, artists, museum specialists and craftspeople. Her research is focused on the anthropology and history of technological medical practices, especially concerning questions of sensorality, embodiment and learning. Dr. Harris also writes about hospital infrastructures in her blog and her twitterfeed. Currently, she is a member of the Maastricht Young Academy and the Global Young Academy, as well as a member of the Inner City Research Ethics Committee.

We started the discussion with the definition of health humanities (as compared with medical humanities), and its role in health professions education. Despite its increasing popularity, the field’s contribution to desired learning outcomes is still to be assessed and proven.
We then somewhat turned the dialogue toward diagnosis practices of care (within and outside clinics), where ‘sensory work’ seems to be very important. One problem for caregivers, like parents, for instances, is how to assign diagnostic meaning to potential childhood disease. Some important questions here are ‘How do caregivers know what warrants (usually immediate) medical care?’ and  ‘How do they judge the severity of their child’s illness?’

The second part of the interview covered the future of digital technologies (including immersive technologies like mixed reality and artificial intelligence) as contributing to teaching sensory awareness in diagnosis and practices of care.

Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- health humanities (vs. medical humanities) 
- diagnosis and practices of care (with their ‘sensory work’)
- caregivers making sense of symptoms and signs of possible disease 
- Western medical practice (objective evidence-based judgments of health) vs. patient’s or caregiver’s experience 
- the future of digital technologies (like MR and AI) for teaching sensory awareness

Relevant papers:
 1) SE Carr, F Noya, B Phillips, A Harris, et al.  Health Humanities curriculum and evaluation in health professions education: a scoping review.  BMC medical Education 21 (1), 2021.
2) S Maslen, A Harris. Becoming a diagnostic agent: A collated ethnography of digital-sensory work in caregiving intra-actions.  Social Science & Medicine 277, 2021.

Dr. Harris’ new books:
A Sensory Education (just out in paperback): https://www.routledge.com/A-Sensory-Education/Harris/p/book/9781350061651
Stethoscope: https://press.uchicago
Making Sense of Medicine: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed
Links to Dr. Harris’ website: www.makingclinicalsense.com

This is episode #23 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 11th of August, 2022.

Today, I talked with Dr. Camila Valenzuela-Moguillansky. She graduated with a PhD in cognitive sciences from the Université Pièrre et Marie Curie (Paris), a Master in cognitive sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and a degree in biology from the University of Chile. In parallel to her academic training, Camila has a background in bodywork: she has been a dancer and yoga practitioner for more than twenty years, and currently works with touch therapy that brings together elements of the somatic experiencing method and craniosacral therapy. Her research has focused, on the one hand, on the relationship between body awareness and pain, studying the experience of people with fibromyalgia. On the other hand, she works on addressing the methodological, theoretical and epistemological challenges involved in the study of experience from an enactive perspective. She led the EASE network project, an international network of researchers around the development of the enactive approach to the study of human experience and is currently developing the project Multidimensional approach to presence: somatic practices and the study of experience (MAPS). Camila is the director of the Laboratorio de fenomenología Corporal in Chile and of the school A MATHA, escola de tecnologías do corpo in Brazil.

Today’s discussion has focused on the scientific study of experience - which has been (re)considered in cognitive psychology and some other fields somewhat more recently. Western science has focused primarily on a mind-independent, objectivist, third-person perspective, thus, neglecting, for the most part, the importance of first-person experience. However, last few decades have seen a new critical vision of science emerging, one recognizing the role of observer and her embodied experience in the generation of knowledge. Today, Camila gives us a nice incursion into the challenges of first-person research and offers some suggestions for the future.

The second part of the interview covered technology where we focused in particular on its (potential) role in (re)shaping our sensory awareness and reviving our sensorium of lived experience.  Here is the show.

Show Notes:

- Lived experience; scientific study of experience (and consciousness)
- Experience from a third-person-, first-person-, or  second-person perspective
- Toward a coherent framework of first-person research (Francisco Varela’s proposal)
- Main challenges of fist-person research
- Understanding memory (from a first-person perspective)
- Descriptions of lived, first-person experience (through language)
- The intersubjectivity issue of first-person experience
- The role of technology in the next 10-20 years in reviving the ‘felt experience’

Links to Dr. Valenzuela-Mogullansky’s websites: 

www.fenomenologiacorporal.org
www.amatha.org

This is episode #22 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 28th of July, 2022. 

My guest today is Dr. Carlos Velasco, associate professor in the Department of Marketing, BI Norwegian Business School (Norway), and the co-founded of the Centre for Multisensory Marketing. Carlos received his D.Phil. in Experimental Psychology from Oxford University, after which he worked in a number of postdoctoral and consulting projects in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. His work is situated at the intersection of Psychology, Marketing, and Human–Computer Interaction, and focuses on understanding, and capitalizing on our multisensory experiences and their guiding principles. He wrote the book "Multisensory experiences: Where the senses meet technology" (2020, Oxford University Press). Carlos has worked with a number of companies from around the world on topics such as multisensory experiences, food and drink, branding, and consumer research.

We started the interview with the broad topic of digital sensory-enabling technologies — and elaborated on the belief that, in the future, digital environments will most likely engage more of the senses and become more interconnected with the real world. But this a very challenging problem, and this most likely will involve a wide range of collaborative efforts across many disciplines. 

We then moved to the reality-virtuality continuum - a framework for classifying the wide range of immersive technologies available today — and discussed the main factors that drive the degree of immersion and presence in digital spaces. 

The second part of the interview covered technology where we focused in particular on how to improve eating experiences in rather specific places, like space. Of course, besides a short debate on the impact technology will have on society in the next 10-20 years, we concluded the show with a dialogue on the ethical implications of such technologies. 

Here is the show.

Show Notes:

- Digital sensory-enabling technologies 
- Are we satisfied with the current immersive digital sensory experiences?
- A wide inter-disciplinary approach to the integration of the different senses that need to be stimulated during digital consumer experiences? And challenges for researchers working at the intersection of these areas
- The reality-virtuality continuum model offers a framework for classifying the wide range of immersive technologies available today
- Individual differences in perception in sensory marketing
- The role does language play in transducing between/ among the various senses
- Eating experiences in space
- The role of technology in the next 10-20 years in reviving the ‘felt consumer experience’
- Ethical implications of  digital sensory-enabling technologies 

Relevant book:
Velasco, Carlos, and Marianna Obrist. Multisensory experiences: Where the senses meet technology. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Link to Dr. Velasco’s website: 

 https://carlosvelasco.info/