Seeing Senses with Sarah Hyndman
Seeing Senses. Where there’s more than meets the eye.
“Recommend this podcast. Be the one who spotted it first. That puts you in the room with brilliant original thinkers”
Join Sarah and her pioneering cross-industry guests to discover the incredible things we can learn when we escape from our silos. Uncover the hidden role multi-sensory perception plays in emotion, meaning and memory. Starting at first sight to all the senses from sound, scent, touch and taste to humour and synaesthesia. From the colour of sound to shapes that taste sweet, each episode brings you into conversation with perfumers, scientists, writers, chefs, artists, designers who are multi-sensory pioneers across different disciplines.
Join Sarah to explore how what we see connects to what we sense and why this matters for how we communicate, create, and connect.
Whether you’re a curious creative, an experience designer, or a business owner wanting to shape stories that resonate on a sensory level, this podcast helps you tap into the magic where science meets feeling.
Links:
More Seeing Senses content & info.
Book Sarah Hyndman to speak at your event.
Sarah’s the founder of Type Tasting and the curator of The Sensologists briefings .
Find Sarah on LinkedIn and on Instagram.
Seeing Senses with Sarah Hyndman
Crossing senses with Professor Charles Spence
Crossing senses with Professor Charles Spence
Seeing senses: Sight, flavour and how expectation reshapes experience
“None of us believe that our senses affect us as much as, in fact, the evidence shows that they do.” Professor Charles Spence
What if your eyes are misleading your tongue?
In this episode of Seeing Senses, experimental psychologist Professor Charles Spence joins Sarah to explore how our senses cross paths more often than we think. From pink yoghurt that tastes sweeter to salty strawberry ice cream, he reveals how the brain uses sight to predict flavour, and how even trained wine tasters can be fooled.
They discuss the dominance of vision in taste perception, the pitfalls of unexpected packaging, and why a pencil and paper sometimes beat brain scans in his lab. It’s a science-rich journey into crossmodal perception, showing how our expectations shape experience across food, design, and daily life.
//
Listen if you're curious about:
- How colour influences flavour
- Why vision overrides taste more often than we realise
- What crossmodalism really means in everyday perception
- Why blind tastings and disconfirmation reveal hidden biases
- How to design better multisensory experiences
- Why even experts fall for sensory illusions
//
Key themes & takeaways:
- Visual cues shape flavour perception, often before we taste
- Crossmodalism explains how the senses work in combination, not isolation
- Sight dominates—even among expert tasters
- Colour, context, and packaging set powerful expectations
- Sensory illusions are common, and often go unnoticed
- Memory and perception are linked, especially around food
- Designing for the senses can create more memorable, effective experiences
- Expectation can override reality, even in flavour
- Simple tools often reveal more than high-tech equipment
- The senses influence us more deeply than we admit
//
Guest:
Professor Charles Spence is a world-famous experimental psychologist who specialises in neuroscience-inspired multisensory design. He’s worked with many of the world’s largest companies, focusing on the design of enhanced multisensory food and drink experiences through collaborations with chefs, baristas, mixologists, chocolatiers, perfumiers, and the food & beverage and flavour & fragrance industries.
//
Bonus for multi-sensory thinkers:
Head to Seeing Senses on Substack for updates and extras.
You’ll find sense-hacking experiments and book recommendations from the guests. Become a paid subscriber to support the making of this podcast (with extra episodes and content).
//
Host:
Sarah Hyndman is a designer/researcher, author and speaker. You can book her for a talk or workshop about Multi-Sensory Thinking here via Type Tasting. Sarah is the founder of Type Tasting, curator of The Sensologists and author of the bestselling book Why Fonts Matter (Penguin/Virgin).
Seeing Senses. Where there’s more than meets the eye.
//
Theme music by AudioKraken. Thank you to Radim Malinic for the inspiration to make a podcast, and to podcasters Mili Tharakan, Klaudia Mitura and Suze Cooper for your generous advice.
This episode is dedicated to the life of my friend Moira Parker.