Sensation

Warm temperatures make us temporarily friendlier. The colour red causes us to perform poorly on tests. Heavy clipboards make the CVs clipped to them seem more impressive. Clean smells promote moral behaviour. Sports teams in black jerseys are given more penalties than teams in other colours.

From the world’s leading expert on the new science of physical intelligence, or ‘embodied cognition’, here is the true story of how the body profoundly affects our thoughts, emotions and decisions about everything from the people we like to the ways we work. Our environment – colours, temperatures, heavy or light objects – influences us in surprising ways that have been hidden until now.

Warm temperatures make us temporarily friendlier. The colour red causes us to perform poorly on tests. Heavy clipboards make the CVs clipped to them seem more impressive. Clean smells promote moral behaviour. Sports teams in black jerseys are given more penalties than teams in other colours.

Thalma Lobel shares fascinating new findings – like how clean smells promote moral behaviour and sports teams in black jerseys are given more penalties than teams in other colours – to reveal how shockingly impressionable we are to sensory input from the world around us.

While bestsellers like Predictably Irrational and Thinking, Fast and Slow explain the ways we make predictable, systematic cognitive errors, Sensation is the first book to show how vulnerable we are to the unconscious influence of our senses over our minds.