What You See Affects What You Smell and Taste
Tuesday, 13th September, 2005
- Richard Farmer
The colour of a wine can affect what a person smells and tastes according to a leading French sensory neurobiologist. Professor Patrick MacLeod, president of the Institute of Taste in France and former director of the sensory neurobiology laboratory at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes has conducted experiments showing that the perception of smells is multi-sensorial. "The colour of a wine - which is visual information - can truly change the taste of the wine," Prof. MacLeod says. "This is not an illusion. A white wine that has been tinted red with an odourless dye will taste different" and create a different pattern of neural activity in the brain.
The professor discussed latest developments in sensory neurobiology at a recent training seminar for professional wine tasters in Paris. He said recent findings upended much conventional wisdom and a fair amount of established science. "Almost everything we have done up to now in the study of taste has been called into question. We have to start over."
Among the findings is that tastes and smells vary -- sometimes dramatically -- from one person to the next. "No two people will ever smell the same thing in the same way. When we perceive an odor, the exact nature of the sensation that is produced depends as much on the observer as the object," he reported. Several factors accounted for diversity in the human sense of smell. The human genome contained 347 olfactory genes -- fully one percent of the total -- while there were only four, for example, for vision. At least half of those genes were polymorphous, meaning that "they have a great potential of variation among themselves," says Mac Leod. Then there is the fact that people have widely divergent thresholds of perception to various odor-emitting substances. The micro-quantity of pyridine -- an organic compound in food flavorings that Mac Leod has used in experiments -- that your cousin finds overwhelmingly unpleasant may be utterly imperceptible to you. For another substance, however, it may be the other way around.".
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