All Text is Suggestion
(that no options appear to align center even though highlighted)

You may find yourself reading this paper and have the urge to reward yourself with something. A well-deserved drink of something perhaps. This however is just a suggestion. There are many things that are suggestions, and unless you have been living under a rock you have probably been bombarded by them every day.

The field of advertising is a fertile ecosystem for suggestion. Manny a company salivates over the ways to increase their profit though sales by utilizing academic research on the power of suggestion. This makes it a great starting point to explain suggestion.

Suggestion in adverting can range from subtle to overt in presentation. A grocery store may have a large picture of a delicious thanksgiving dinner on a long table surrounded by a happy family. What about this picture is so noteworthy I beg you to ask, so I may point out, this image most likely shows a well-cooked turkey in the center of the table, and the giant picture itself that you are looking at is most likely next to a large pile of turkeys that the grocery store is selling. The image is at least suggesting two things. Firstly, it is overtly suggesting that you need a turkey to celebrate thanksgiving; oh what a coincidence, the grocery store is selling turkeys! Secondly, it is subtly suggesting that this family, with a turkey on their table, is happy, therefore your family could be happy for thanksgiving too if you had a turkey on your table.

Suggestion can sometimes be what you cannot see. The best horror movies, in my opinion embody this. The ones where you do not see the monster, but where it is heavily suggested that there is a monster there. Your mind takes over and starts to conjure up all sorts of spooky fantasies of what the monster could be.

Suggestions that occur within the mind can also come from words or phrases. Vannesa Van Edwards illustrates this in her book Captivate when she presents the reader the phrase “fresh warm delicious cinnamon bun with a white frosted glaze melting down the sides.” She points out that often when she says that sentence to people they start to salivate. Even though there is no sweet cinnamon pastry with warm dripping frosting in front of you, your mind actives and starts to imagine it.

Even more weird is that the human mind is physically unable to perform the negative of this. For example, if I say, “Do not think of a pink elephant!” You will inevitably think of a pink elephant.

Furthermore, since all communication is mostly nonverbal, suggestion can also be nonverbal. Think about how people nonverbally communicate on a date to suggest doing romantic things.

Although there is a wide verity of ways suggestive language can be used, for my uses, I would like to focus suggestion used in language.

The next I will be clarifying is how taste and a term I have coined, “Phantom Flavors”.

People who haven’t studied taste are usually surprised by how it works. Your tongue can gather information on your food by sending signals to the brain that inform you if you are eating something sweet, sour, bitter, tart, or savory. As a side note a common misconception is that spice is part of this group, scientifically speaking spice is actually just pain. Now the interesting part is that your tongue can not tell you if you are eating a blueberry or strawberry. It is your nose, that can tell you if you are eating a blueberry or a strawberry. We can see this in patients that have disorder and can not smell but can taste having this very issue. When you go to a wine tasting and you see people sniffing their wine, contrary to popular belief it is not weird. Perhaps you have found it pleasurable outside of a restaurant to smell food being cooked

While flavors are the sensation that you taste when you eat or drink; it is information about your food via hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Phantom flavors on the other hand are flavors people say they taste, but are flavors that are non-existent, are unlikely to exist, or seemingly random. I have encountered situations where people have told me they taste flavors of cherry or pear in something that should not have any such flavors.

One time in particular illustrates this the best, when I presented two different bottles of wine and a small sample of each to the customer. I described the bottle with abstract art on the label as having a pear undertone, and the bottle with the flowers I described as having a floral aroma. There is no deceit from me, I made sure to introduce the bottles and place them apart and I placed each sample of each in front of their receptive bottle. The customer tried each, and then looked at me after trying a sample from the flora bottle, and her eyes widened, and she said, “Oh I really taste the pear in this!”. I do not know if my face betrayed my surprise and disbelief at her statement, but I can only speculate how she confused my words and furthermore how she thought she was tasting pear undertones from the flora label.

In the upshot, the results speak for themselves. She clearly thought I said the floral label had pear undertones and tasted pear. Customer is always right, right?

In my next section of my thesis, I would like to investigate further if there are other examples of this, and to perhaps prove that under the influence of suggestion, you can be fooled into believing something by simply telling you it is true. I would also like address parallel issues such as flavor association confusion, and other possible explanations. And lastly it would be interesting as well if I could find a way to set up shop on campus and lie to students about what they are consuming.

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