Science behind William Blake, umami and the human mind
The year was 1907. A chemistry professor sat on the dinner table with his family. Midway through his dinner, he abruptly stopped eating and starred into space. Professor Ikeda, trying to contain his exasperation, gave his dashi (soup stock) a gentle stir while his family remained oblivious to his dinner table antics. The addition of kombu (seaweed) in the soup added a delicious savoury taste. There was simply no known sensation to describe the precise taste of the seaweed.
Over the next few months, Prof Ikeda extracted the glutamate substance from the seaweed and coined this unique taste ‘umami’ from the words umai (delicious) and mi (taste). Despite umami being accepted as a fifth basic taste in Europe and America only from the mid-1980s, there in that dinner table moment in 1907, Prof Ikeda mysteriously embarked into this journey of discovering a fifth taste. It is now well established that we have atleast five taste receptors scattered in the mouth for sweet, sour, bitter and salts; as well as receptors developed specifically for umami. Some evolutionary biologists believe that umami signals the presence of easy-to-digest protein that is present in cooked foods. While raw eggs and meat have some level of umami, they cultivate a substantially higher level of umami when cooked.
The Baldwin Effect proposed by American philosopher and psychologist, James Mark Baldwin, can offer a plausible explanation for the development of these umami specific taste receptors. The theory suggests that through a process of natural selection, species learn new behaviours necessary for their survival which eventually becomes instinctive for future generations. It would therefore seem incredibly advantageous for humans to adapt a taste receptor for foods with a high protein concentration. Being encoded as a gratifying experience in a person’s natural biology essentially guarantees that people will naturally tend to perform a desirable action without necessarily understanding why. Since it is costly to make long neural connections for every sensation, we tend to approximate these sensations into experiences that we recognise. During that ostensibly mysterious day, Prof Ikeda was able to perceive a new sensation that has been deeply engraved within our genetic makeup for hundreds of years.
What does it mean to have finite perceptions in a world of infinite sensations? Do we strictly perceive the same sensations of reality as one another? How does language act as a limiting factor on how we experience the world? Through opening The Doors of Perception, we can peak into our own kaleidoscopic doors to understand what it truly means to be human.
- Recommended to pair the read with the song Sky Children by Kaleidoscope, as you peak through some of your own doors.