Can you believe it? Does our vision and hearing, even our emotions and memories, also participate in the final judgment of taste?
This process is like this. Food stimulates the senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, trigeminal nerve/touch), and then your brain will process it with your unique cognition (personal memory, emotion) to produce a flavor.
So these steps are divided into input/stimulation, senses, brain and taste.
There are many variables in the process of taste perception, and scientists are still studying how all senses create a taste experience.
Although there are some studies and interesting findings, this does not mean that this is the final conclusion.
Food is what we will discuss in detail, including plants and animals.
Food can not only provide nutrients for life, but also arouse strong emotions.
When you eat, you are not in a vacuum. Even if you are, it will still affect your dining experience.
No matter what your environment is, it will affect your senses.
If you have eaten takeout, you know it's true. In different environments, the same food will have different tastes.
The smells, sights and sounds around you will overlap and become part of the whole flavor experience.
Smell is the main factor affecting consumers' taste. The influence of odor on the overall flavor accounts for 75%.
Scientists claim that the human nose can detect 1 trillion smells, which is a hodgepodge of smells.
Food companies take advantage of the great influence of smell on flavor, and usually add different flavoring agents/condiments to the same substrate to change flavor, such as candied beans or soda water. These spices can be natural or artificial.
Smell can reach olfactory receptor cells in two ways. The first one is through the nose, which is called straight nose smell. The second is through the back of the mouth and throat, which is called post-nasal sense of smell.
The latter is considered to be the more important of the two. So we often feel that we haven't swallowed anything, just like we didn't eat it in our mouth.
Then, the odor is absorbed into the recipient cells through mucus. Disease and age will lead to changes in mucus, affect the sense of smell, and thus affect the perception of taste.
There are about120,000 olfactory receptor cells in humans. The higher the odor concentration, the stronger the brain signal. If the flow of odorous substances in the air is blocked, such as when the nose is blocked during a cold, the signal cannot reach the receptor cells, resulting in the weakening or disappearance of the odor signal.
The olfactory nerve endings on the bridge of the nose transmit information to the brain through the olfactory bulb. Olfactory information is processed in brain regions related to memory, emotion and speech. Some smells may even temporarily inhibit your pronunciation.
Odor is also processed by autonomic nervous system or unconscious nervous system. This is why smells have a direct impact on our bodies. Some smells can cause nausea or vomiting. Some smells will make us drool and make our gastric juice secrete a lot.
Loss of smell refers to the loss of the ability to perceive smells. Without the sense of smell, patients will miss important connections related to memory and emotion. Patients will also feel isolated or isolated and depressed. The lack of sense of smell makes patients feel different from most people about food.
Taste is a secondary factor in determining flavor. As mentioned earlier, there are six officially recognized flavors:
Sweet, salty, sour, bitter, fresh and fat (Oleogustus)
We have taste buds on the palate and throat, and there are also taste buds packaged as papillae on the tongue. Everyone has different number of taste buds. In addition, the number and types of taste receptors possessed by each taste bud are also different. All the information contained in each taste bud forms the taste information sent to your brain.
Chemicals in food enter the taste pores on taste buds, which are taste cells. At the bottom of taste cells are nerves.
These nerves transmit chemical information and trigeminal information to the brain. There are three nerves that provide your brain with taste information.
Facial nerves send messages from the first two thirds of the tongue.
The hypoglossal nerve sends information from the back third of the tongue.
The glossopharyngeal nerve sends messages from your palate and throat.
Supertaster like mild food because they get too much stimulation from it every day.
The vice-tasters are at the other extreme, with low taste bud density, so they like heavy taste.
The taste science laboratory conducted a test to test the sensitivity of subjects to mint. The cooling effect of mint is perceived by trigeminal nerve, which is technically tasteless. According to their sensitivity to the taste, smell and coolness of mint, the subjects were divided into three groups:
Very strong reaction, you are a highly sensitive taster. Highly sensitive tasters believe that the taste of food is very important. They like a lot of food, and they are very enthusiastic about it.
Moderate to strong reaction, you are a moderately sensitive taster. Moderately sensitive tasters think the taste of food is very important. They like a lot of food, don't like some food, and are often passionate about food.
Too weak to detect the reaction, you are a slightly sensitive taster. Slightly sensitive tasters don't believe that the taste of food is important. They like some food, but don't like some food. They are not very interested in food.
In other words, for these friends, you can do whatever you want about food. So if you have such friends around you, it is usually caused by physiological reasons.
The trigeminal nerve senses the texture and temperature information of food.
Trigeminal nerve has sensory and motor information from three branches: ophthalmic nerve, maxillary nerve and mandibular nerve.
Like the taste and smell nerves, the trigeminal nerve has its own nerve to transmit pain or stimulation information to the brain.
The texture of food and drink can determine whether odorants can easily enter the taste buds and olfactory system. Rough or granular food is difficult to reach the place of perception. Butter and liquid food soon reach the sensory receptors.
Compared with liquid food, the perception time of granular food lags behind and the intensity of taste perception is weak.
It sounds like a genius way to make food more delicious, but turning food into liquid is not our original intention. Obviously, texture is only a part of complex flavor perception.
One of the biggest challenges people face is to believe that the burning sensation caused by spicy taste is not a taste. This is simply too difficult. Foods in Mexico, India, Texas-Mexico, Sichuan, South Korea and Thailand all contain capsaicin. The trigeminal nerve can also feel high temperature and send pain information to the brain.
The same applies to the feeling of cold or fresh mint Peppermint, menthol, ethanol or camphor will react with nerve cells that also feel cold. This information also reaches the brain through the trigeminal nerve.
No matter how you feel, whether it is hot or cold, it is not caused by the real temperature change, but an illusion.
Under normal circumstances, we perceive cold through sensory neurons. These neurons have a protein called TRPM8, which stands for "Member 8 of Cation Channel Subfamily M of Transient Receptor Potential". TRPM8 is an ion channel that changes its shape when the environment is below 26℃, allowing calcium ions to enter nerve cells. The brain interprets the signal of TRPM8 as cold. Similarly, the protein of TRPV 1 is also an ion channel protein, which is used to sense thermal signals.
Mint has a molecule called menthol, which, when combined with TRPM8, can open ion channels and send a cold signal to the brain. Capsacin, a chemical in pepper, has the same effect on TRPV 1 protein, and it will lead to the illusion of heat, but there is no actual temperature change.
Heating food can release more compounds. This will make the food more fragrant. However, the effect of temperature on taste is still under study.
Cooling will reduce the aroma and taste, so it must not be taste. The most obvious reason for drinking cold drinks is that it can cool our bodies-but this is not the case. Once a cold drink is drunk, the body will cope with the cold by contracting the blood vessels near the cold stimulation surface, so that the heat will not disappear. TRPM8 will also invoke the heating mechanism after being activated by cold water.
The color of food will affect your taste. A study found that dark red juice is sweeter for testers. A trend shows that the stronger the color, the stronger the taste and flavor.
Another study dyed white wine into red wine. Testers use typical red wine descriptors to describe wine, not white wine descriptors.
Foods and drinks with untrue colors are often easily mistaken. Remember the dramatic experiment in whitley that we mentioned before? The experimental process is as follows:
The experiment prepared standard western food, including steak, peas and French fries. In the room with specially changed lights, western food looks normal and there is no problem. The subjects began to enjoy dinner, but in the middle, the lights suddenly returned to normal. They found that their steak was blue, peas were red and French fries were green! Many people immediately began to feel queasy, and the experiment had to be terminated.
It all depends on our expectations and what color our culture is associated with.
Of course, our brains can transcend the visual state of food. Hot rice or stew looks terrible, but due to other factors, such as smell or memory, we can enjoy the meal very much.
The influence of sound on taste is still inconclusive, but there are many interesting examples.
Maybe you have heard that music can improve the dining experience. Heston Blumenthal uses the sound of the ocean to match seafood dishes.
In restaurants in London, the "werewolf" restaurant offers a lollipop called "sonic cake", which is actually toffee wrapped in chocolate. A small card tells you a phone number, prompting "press 1 to taste the sweetness; Press 2 to taste bitterness. " People who pressed 1 heard a sparkling high-pitched melody. Press 2 to hear a slow, deep tone composed of deep tones.
This dish is the latest example of "multi-sensory dining" initiated by Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University. The study was conducted by Charles Spencer, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University. He has worked with some of the best and cutting-edge chefs in the world, including Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal.
He found that high notes emphasized sweetness and low notes emphasized bitterness.
Spencer said, "We can't eat and drink without being affected by the environment." Your brain is always looking for other clues to infer what your experience is-how sweet, how delicious and how much I like it?
Another study shows that playing high-frequency music while eating crisp food will make the food more crisp. Higher frequency sounds will also bring sweetness to candy. Low-frequency music increases people's perception of the bitterness of candy.
Music is not the only sound we hear at dinner. Other background sounds can also affect flavor perception. Noisy background noise seems to reduce the salty and sweet taste. So concerts, airplanes and construction sites are not places to enjoy dessert. So the food on the plane is not delicious, and there is also the influence of background noise.
Entering the brain level, what the brain needs to do is very complicated. It needs to process information from smell, taste, trigeminal nerve, vision and sound.
These messages finally meet in the insula that recognizes it. This information obtains emotion and meaning through temporal lobe and cortex.
Because smell is closely related to memory, especially autobiographical memory, it can bring strong emotions and feelings. Emotional events and ceremonies in the past are deeply rooted in their smells, such as the scent of a lover or the pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving Day.
This is why comfortable food brings us happiness.
Everyone has different food, which is usually related to nostalgia, so this is a comfort to people.
Comfortable food may not be so delicious, but it will definitely make you feel comfortable and satisfied.
Once we have determined the smell, we need to figure out what to do next. Taste and emotions are sent to the orbital prefrontal cortex. Here we evaluate and decide how to respond.
We like this delicious food. Do you want to eat more? Or do we think it's poison and spit it out?
Whatever you decide, have a good appetite! !
Love life and food!