My theory of how and why we determine taste

 

The human brain can store ten thousand different scents!

 The human tongue has the ability to distinguish merely four (some now say five) taste responses to what it touches:  Sweet, bitter, sour and salt (and ostensibly umami, or savory, being categorized as the fifth).  That, in a nutshell, is basically IT for the literal sense of what we call ‘taste’. 

Spice-heat ‘taste’ is experienced when one of, or a mix of, the delicate tissues of the tongue, palate, sinuses and/or mouth interior (the membrane flesh) reacts to the acids, vapors and essential oils found in those ‘spicy hot’ foods.  Although it technically isn’t actually a sense of taste, but rather of touch.

Thermal hot and cold ‘tastes’ are detected in varying degrees throughout the mouth, throat and lips, as with the rest of the body.  Falling also under the sense of touch, they also technically aren’t actual tastes.

What we ultimately perceive as ‘taste’ is fundamentally a co-op sort of thing between the tongue’s senses of taste and the aromatic sense of smell, utilizing that handful of tongue assessments compounded with thousands of scents perceived through the olfactory system.   In French, the word for ‘smell’ and ‘sense’ is the same.  The two work in strong association.  Spice heat and thermal heat, however, compound our senses intake and do in fact affect our initial reception of these incoming flavors, manipulating them deeper or lighter, more rapidly or restrained.  

And finally, any combination of a couple, a few, or all of those four or five tongue assessments commingled with thousands of potential aromas -- themselves blended in any multiple of combinations that the nose can inhale – and, oh brother, we have an almost infinite number of resulting potential tastes.   

It is said that the brain can store ten thousand smells.  If you would like to therefore envision the number of possible taste options, then try 5 X 5 (tongue taste combinations) X 10,000 X 10,000 (sensory smell combinations) equaling somewhere around two and a half billion; yes the big ‘B’.  That’s my guess.  OK, just to be fair, not all those individual smells that can be stored are ones that would work at all well with flavor (I won’t even go into a sampling of descriptive smells here), but that’s getting technical.  We can easily see that the potential flavor combination offerings are reaching way more than we can taste in a lifetime. 

You can be sure I’m giving it my best shot.

Smell is the strongest of the senses to re-enforce memory.  The sense of smell is the only of the five senses that deposits sensory information immediately and directly into the brain without transmission via nerve cells.

Fortunately, the brain actually can remember those many thousands of smells and therefore tastes, a vestige survival response developed in ancient man – continuous protection as to what was safe, healthy, poisonous or pleasant to consume, touch, stay away from, or sense the nearness of.  That’s why we may find ourselves smelling something, and then suddenly experiencing an amazingly clear memory from our remote past -- completely baffling us.  Well, that’s the smell-memory thing in action.  That’s why ‘comfort food’ is such a big deal – it’s those oftentimes childhood era food aromas and flavors that evoke loving, delicious, happy and secure moments. 

Memory.  It’s approaching personally pathetic, but I can’t remember what I did two weeks ago.  However, my brain will precisely remember that intricately mingled chlorine/vinyl/coconut-suntan-lotion/BBQ swimming-pool birthday party smell memory from when I was ten.

What better coincidence than to take advantage of this incredible memory storage capacity than to use it to maintain a library of culinary aromas -- savories and sweets, piquants and subtleties – aromas that can be mixed to enhance flavor and texture, right there when we need it. 

And it’s built in!