The Hidden Complexity of Taste: How Our Brain Shapes Flavour and Emotion
Here's an extract from my new book, The Shape of Taste.
Nearly every sensorial experience is multifaceted. Any food or drink has more than just one flavor. I discussed this when thinking about coffee in Chapter 2, but also listen to any wine expert describing a French Malbec or a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. Their language may be flowery, but it does capture the complexity and delight to be found in just a sip of wine, and this is equally true of almost anything that you eat or drink, should you care to pause and think about it.
Textures also change as we eat, breaking down from hard to soft, from crunchy to chewy, from crumbly to melting. Many favorite foods combine different textures, with crispy outsides and soft centers, or a chewy consistency with crunchy bits.
?If the sensorial experience of a product is complex and changing, then logically so is the emotional response to it. If you are receiving multiple and evolving stimuli, presumably your emotional reactions are also complex and changing. If this is the case, then how is it possible to attribute a single emotional journey – a single Shape of Taste – to the product, and how do you know which of the multiple stimuli the consumer is responding to and why?
The human brain is brilliant at dealing with complexity. It receives billions of messages every second – so many that we cannot consciously process and be aware of them all. Our subconscious mind processes and prioritizes these messages and we are consciously aware of only a very small proportion of them. These tend to be the important ones. Thus, we notice if something changes – how often have you become consciously aware of a background noise (for example, a fridge humming) only when it suddenly stops, or you only noticed that deer in the woods when it moved, even though you were looking straight at it only seconds before. It’s not that you couldn’t see or hear these things; it’s just that you didn’t notice them.
The same is true of your senses of taste, touch, and smell. Your subconscious mind sorts the multitude of stimuli that you receive and you notice what is new, different, changing, challenging, or alarming. If you sit in a room for a while with a scented candle or air freshener, after a while you may stop noticing the aroma. But if you leave the room, and especially if you go outside into fresh air and then return, there it is – you may even think it’s getting a little too strong and blow out the candle. Your conscious mind ignores what it deems to be less important – things that are not changing, the consistency in your environment – and notices the changes.
When hit with a multitude of data, the brain sorts it in a way that helps you to process, interpret, and understand it. When you take a sip of wine or cola, when you take a bite of a chocolate bar or a mouthful of dinner, you are immediately assaulted with a multitude of flavors, textures, aromas… the complexity of which is totally baffling. How do you make any sense of this? How do you break this complexity down into identifiable flavors?
Your brain sorts it for you, connecting what you see and smell with the flavors and textures that you experience. There are five flavors that have been identified (sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami). These flavors are complemented by the aromas that you sense through your retro-nasal cavity as you chew and by the textures you can feel. Subconsciously, your brain collects all this data together, orders it, and presents you with the information in a way that makes sense and that you can understand.
How your brain does this – and the fact that you perceive your taste experience in a way that is not necessarily the same as the way that you actually experience it – is demonstrated by the following story and experiment.
When I was at school, many more years ago than I care to remember, I was taught that the taste buds on your tongue are in zones. On the tip of the tongue are the taste buds sensitive to sweet flavors. Also towards the front are taste buds that register salt. Those at the edges note sourness, and bitter flavors are picked up at the back of the tongue. When I was at school, umami did not even exist (or certainly not in a British context).
These were reasonably self-evident ‘facts’. Try it for yourself. If you pay attention as you eat, you can sense that this is how you taste your food. You can taste sweetness on the tip of your tongue and saltiness just behind it. Sour is at the sides (just suck a lemon or taste a spoonful of vinegar and the sides of your tongue will ache with the sourness), and bitter is at the back of the mouth, often peaking just as you swallow.
But now we know better. V B Collings debunked this myth as early as 1974, although it took a while to reach the school curriculum.
Taste buds are not as specialized as was previously thought. All taste buds register all flavors, sending very similar messages back to the brain. So, the zoning of the taste buds that you experienced if you tried the taste experiment two paragraphs ago is just the way that your brain sorts and presents this information. You perceive the tastes to be zoned in this way, even though there is no scientific reason for this to be so.
And so we get to one of the most interesting questions of psychology – in fact, even of philosophy. If we can demonstrate that our perception of an event is different from its actual occurrence, then which is most important: the way that we perceive it, or the way that it actually occurs?
The answer, I think, is that it depends on your perspective and what you are trying to achieve.
If you are a biochemist seeking to understand taste, stimuli, the workings of our biochemical receptors such as our taste buds, I expect you are much more interested in what is actually happening. But if you are just trying to enjoy your food, or you are a food psychologist, a brand manager, or a product developer for a food company, you are likely to be more interested in our perception of taste and flavor and our response to it rather than the precise biochemistry behind it.
So, when, with our research at The Marketing Clinic, we are dealing with the complexities of different stimuli and consumers’ emotional responses to them, we look at people’s perceived experience, the way that they feel it, rather than the scientifically accurate actual experience. This has interesting consequences.
Chris Lukehurst is a Consumer Psychologist and a Director at The Marketing Clinic:
Providing Clarity on the Psychological relationships between consumers and brands
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