We Eat With Our Eyes
The Intricacies of Visual and Olfactory Integration
It's often said that you eat with your eyes. This concept underscores the seamless integration between our visual and olfactory systems. Our brains work tirelessly to confirm the reality that our senses are presenting to us. A disconnection between sight and taste would be unsettling—imagine biting into an orange only to find it tastes like fried chicken. Such a contradiction could potentially represent an illness or dysfunction that could compromise survival and reproduction potential.
When light enters our eyes, it's converted into signals by rods and cones, then processed by different brain regions to form an image by synthesizing the combination of shapes and colors based on previous experience. This is akin to how we delineate smells: initially, we might distinguish just two distinct colors or scents, but with time our brain creates connections built through repeated comparison and expands upon this reference set. This process enables us to develop a sophisticated "rolodex" of visual and olfactory stimuli, ever-expanding our detailed sensory recall capability. Language further bolsters our ability to recognize and describe these sense images by organizing the complex configuration of signals around a single identifier, like recognizing a face not by each individual detail but by their summation.
Our expectations shaped by visual cues inform our perceived experience. When we see a dark, viscous liquid, our brain sets an expectation of a heavy, robust taste, readying us with the relative sensory lexicon. Overriding these central processes is challenging as our brains are hard-wired to create cohesive and comprehensible formations out of the information chaos we must constantly navigate.
For winemakers, sensory experiences often have consequences. Decisions are made based on known faulty apparatus: cognitive bias and ineptitudes lead us down the treacherous path of imperfect reality generation. Blind tasting can be an essential discipline in finding and understanding the boundaries and contours of each individual's cognitive landscape. With time this practiced self-awareness can provide a point of reference that gives us greater confidence in our decisions.
The labrynthine relationship between our senses and language, and our tendency and desire to describe and therefore experience them in accurate and repeatable manners, illustrates that the joy of and capacity for wine tasting is not the exclusive domain of “experts,” but a shared, fundamental biological drive of our biology to seamlessly align our sensory perceptions with reality, potentially saving us from poison or providing us essential nutrition.
Follow this link to watch as we taste a variety of wines that have been dyed with food coloring to see firsthand how visual cues can influence our smell and taste perception. Will our eyes deceive our palate, or can we accurately describe each wine despite the color changes?