Lit Review: Examining the Taste

Do You Taste What I Taste?

Do certain physiological traits make some wine critics better than others? In a three-part series this week, Mike Steinberger examines the physiology of the oenophile. In this part, he examines the age-old stoner's question: Do you taste what I taste? In Part II, he set out to discover whether he's a "supertaster." And in Part III, he examined whether being a supertaster helps you evaluate wine.

Contrary to the oft-cited aphorism, there actually is some accounting for taste. We know, for instance, that the vast majority of flavors that we perceive when eating and drinking are actually aromas, filtered up to our noses through a tube called the retronasal passage. Our taste buds, on the other hand, detect just five basic flavor sensations: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory. It is also known that some tongues have a higher degree of sensitivity to flavors and textures than others. As for the nose, while it is a more perceptive instrument than the tongue, and thus a more useful one at the dinner table, it is pretty limited in its own right; research has shown that human beings have remarkably poor olfactory abilities, both in the aggregate (dogs and cats can detect many more odors than we do) and episodically (we can sniff out at most four aromas at any one time).

The tongue and the nose do not, of course, tell us what we think about the things we smell, taste, and feel; it is the brain that draws the conclusions. How the brain translates and interprets the information collected by the tongue and the nose is a dauntingly complex transaction—"higher-order processing" is the term of art—that is only just beginning to be understood. This much, at least, is clear: Memory, experience, and expectations play an enormous part in how individuals react to aromas and flavors, and may even be determinative. Why we notice some flavors and aromas but not others, and why we enjoy some but not others, results from the interplay of visual cues, genetic endowments, physical attributes, and personality features. Because these traits vary dramatically from one individual to the next, flavor and aroma perceptions vary dramatically from one individual to the next.
Reference

Examining the Perception of Taste
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