SensoGram 32: "Too Good For Words" Part 1: The Challenge   We all experience sensations that are literally “too good for words”.  If you are asked to describe a really pleasurable experience, your only recourse will be to hedonic terms such as “blissful”, “wonderful”, or “exquisite”.  Not that these words are inappropriate; it’s just that they are not descriptors in the conventional sense.  To use these words when tasting a wine, for example, is to give no clue as to the character of the wine and why it tastes wonderful.  In product development we need “objective” descriptors to tell us what it is that makes the experience wonderful.      The truth, unfortunately, is that this will not happen!  There are no objective words appropriate to the description of a blissful experience.  If talking about a food, we might say that the appearance is perfect, the flavour is just right, the texture is flawless – but this tells us nothing about its character.  And this is not merely the result of an inadequate vocabulary or of insufficient training.  When you turn to wine writers who supposedly have well-developed palates and vocabularies to match, you will see the same effect:  once the wines reach ‘gold medal level’ – blissful - the experts find themselves restricted to flowery hedonic terms, just like the rest of us.   We noticed this phenomenon a long time ago.  We might call it The SensoMetrics First Law of Sensory Experience:    “When an experience is suboptimal, it is usually possible to say what is wrong with it, where it is defective; but when an experience is sublime, it is just that – and there are no other words to describe it.”   For confirmation of this effect, look no further than the open-ended responses often collected in product testing.  When a product is really well liked, the comments are few; when a product is not at all liked, the comments are many and various.     Information Integration vs Information Selection   Fundamentally, this phenomenon reflects human sensory functioning.  The human sensory system can operate in two different modes:  (1) information integration and (2) information selection.  When a sensory experience is very pleasant, the system operates under information integration.  All the sensory input is assimilated and integrated into a singular hedonic experience, prompting a response such as ‘wonderful’ or ‘lovely’.  Importantly, this occurs at a preconscious level.  We do not – in fact cannot – consciously analyse the elements of this experience; it just happens.  Hence, when we really like something, it is “too good for words”.  There is no consciousness of the sensory integration, thus there are no words to describe the elements.   But when the sensory experience is not so pleasant, the system operates under information selection.  In this case we are aware of the defective elements of a stimulus.  You would know this only too well:  when there is a problem with a product it almost leaps out at you – it is too cold or too hot, too strong or too weak, too hard or too soft, and so on.    So here we contrast two very different processes.  When the product experience is below par, you will be able to identify the defects and articulate them (information selection); but when the product experience is sublime, this is all you will be able to say (information integration).   As a consequence of these two processes, we find that  sensory evaluation is extremely successful at diagnosing, and hence overcoming, product defects.  But once a product is reasonably acceptable, with no defects readily apparent, the descriptors dry up!  The product may be quite good (though far from great) yet there are no words to describe the deficit in acceptability that still exists – and, consequently, no direction as to how to overcome this deficit.    So we have a challenge:  how do we use sensory research to engineer really good, first-rate products, and not just rectify defects?  A way past this stumbling block will be revealed  in the next SensoGram.