Yesterday I attended The Firth Inational Conference on Neuroesthetics. Don’t go away quite yet. It’s not as intimidating as you think. From the program:
Flavors of Experience
Billions of dollars are spent annually, by both consumers and producers, on fine food, wines, and perfumes. A good dinner is a pleasure that may be long remembered, while small and taste can bring back long forgotten memories stretching back to childhood, as was immortalized by Marcel Proust’s description. Why is this? What brain pathways do these products activate? What criteria do chefs, wine makers, and parfumers – as artists – use to judge that their products will have appeal?
Neuroesthetics is the intersection of mind and art. Esoteric as can be, but exciting none the less.
Yale’s Dana Small kicked things off.
What is flavor? Taste, small, sound, oral somatosensation (temperature, texture, chemesthesis).
How does the brain pull all these together into a single experience?
Flavor = taste+aroma. Taste is limited to bitter, sour, sweet, salt. Aroma is all over.
Do this.
Dr. Small passed out Jelly Bellies and we marvelled at the experience. The airflow to the back of the nose enables the taste. Even though the nose is identifying the flavor, it seems that the tongue is doing it.
When taste and smell are experienced simultaneously in food the conditions of spatial and temporal concordance are met, and associative learning can occur.
If experience induces the formation of new neural circuits then we might predict that there will be greater differences in brain response… I love the taste of Limburger cheese, if only I could get it past my nose. Olfaction is a dual-sense modality.
Next up was Randall Grahm, founder and winemaker at Bonny Doon, speaking brilliantly and humorously on The Phenomenology of Terroir.
Goût de terroir. Soil intelligence. Not put in by the winemaker.
Drip irrigation turns hunter wines into flavorless consumers. In the new world, all wines taste the same because of this. Like a small child singing the same song over and over again, never tiring of it. (He has a two-year old and knows this goes on).
Great terroir = somewhereness.
St. Emilion. In a great wine, say a Cheval blanc, you receive the terroir of St. Emilion and the Cheval-oir. Robert Parker’s favorite vino is a St. Emilion that does not taste like a St. Emilion.
If you know the area the wine comes from, a synesthesia comes out.
Labels from Bonny Doon
Powerful New World wines are all bluster, full of fruit, too much tannin and oak, and 15% alcohol.. Terroir speaks in a small voice.
Would like to offer a glass with real terroir but instead I will provide you with substitute florid langauge.
Minerals have been overlooked, especially how they are organized.
It goes down the throat like the Baby Jesus in velvet underwear, say the French. Tasting a terroir requires synesthesia.
Biodynamics (Rudolph Steiner). Petrie dish analysis shows symmetry of terroir wines and disorganization of a highly-rated U.S. Cab.
There are many rubbish wines that people just adore.
Americans are obsessed with climate.
Burgundy is where it’s at. Pinor noir has most potential for producing something transcendental.
Baylor’s Reed Montague spoke on Comparing Pepsi to Picasso: Neural Valuation Responses to aesthetic and consummatory preference.
I’ll steer clear of complexity here. Rewards in the brain come from receiving a shot of dopamine. (Has there ever been a more aptly named substance?) The size of the dopamine hit is proportional to how well or poorly a result (maybe a sip of Coke) meets your expectation, and your expectation is the sum of the perceived value of rewards discounted for time. The brain is calculating something akin to discounted cash flow although Dr. Montague was fuzzy about the cost of capital one applies.
Packaging matters, for it influences expectation. In a side experiment, Coke was poured into a brand-new sink. Volunteers refused to drink it, even when assured of cleanliness and offered $35 to do so.
By the time we got through The Neuroeshestics of Smell: From Pavlov to Proust, with Pleasure, I was fading fast and took a walk around the Berkeley campus.
Ergo, I conclude that sum does not necassarily follow cogito because the senses play tricks.
Related posts:
