Rachel Herz – författare

The Scent of Desire explores our sense of smell in a compelling and engaging manner, from emotions and memory to aromatherapy and pheromones.In this first and definitive book on the psychology of smell, neuroscientist Rachel Herz traces the importance of smell in our lives, from nourishment to procreation to our relationships with the people closest to us and the world. Smell was the very first sense to evolve and is located in the same part of the brain that processes emotion, memory, and motivation. To our ancestors, the sense of smell wasn''t just important, it was crucial to existence and it remains so today. Our emotional, physical, even sexual lives are profoundly shaped by both our reactions to and interpretations of different smells.Herz examines the role smell plays in our lives, and how this most essential of senses is imperative to our well-being, investigating how our sense of smell functions, what purpose it serves, and shows how inextricably it is linked to our survival. She introduces us to people who have lost their ability to smell and shows how their experiences confirm this sense''s importance by illuminating the traumatic effect its loss has on the quality of day-to-day living. Herz illustrates how profoundly scent and the sense of smell affect our daily lives with numerous examples and personal accounts based on her years of research.For anyone who has ever wondered about human nature or been curious about the secrets of both the body and the mind, The Scent of Desire is a fascinating, down-to-earth tour of the psychology and biology of our most neglected sense, the sense of smell.

Sensation & Perception, Sixth Edition, introduces students to their own senses, emphasizing human sensory and perceptual experience and the basic neuroscientific underpinnings of that experience. The authors, specialists in their respective domains, strive to spread their enthusiasm for fundamental questions about the human senses and the impact that answers to those questions can have on medical and societal issues.

An exploration into the psychology of eating in today’s unprecedented first world pantry of abundance, access and excess, Why You Eat What You Eat examines the sensory, psychological, neuroscientific and physiological factors that influence our eating habits. Rachel Herz uncovers the fascinating and surprising facts that affect food consumption: bringing reusable bags to the supermarket encourages us to buy more treats; our beliefs about food affect the number of calories we burn; TV alters how much we eat; and what we see and hear changes how food tastes. Herz reveals useful techniques for managing cravings, such as resisting repeated trips to the buffet table, and how aromas can be used to curb overeating. Why You Eat What You Eat mixes the social with the scientific to uncover how psychology, neurology and physiology shape our relationship with food and how food alters the relationships we have with ourselves and with one another.