Our brain’s ability to store visual images in memory and more or less instantly compare them with new inputs for similarities and dissimilarities is impressive. Rather than deal with the many individual features each memory contains, we find it more efficient to stitch the bits together into patterns we can more readily utilize.
Recent research suggests that this is exactly what happens with sensations of taste and smell. In fact, the processing of taste and olfactory perceptions is so similar to those of sight and hearing that one neuroscientist refers to these composite inputs as flavor images. Like visual images, they’re stored for later use.
But it’s not just the tastes and smells that are filed away, it’s whatever else happens to be going on around us at the moment: including what we were seeing and hearing, the company we kept and whether we were feeling safe and happy or anxious and vulnerable. When a flavor image is retrieved, all these associated elements come right along for the ride.
The most celebrated example of this is surely the one provided by French novelist Marcel Proust for whom, nibbling the now famous tea-soaked madeleine, . . . the whole village of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidarity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, as full and rich in recall as it had been in real life.
Food critic Anton Ego’s nostalgia scene in the 2007 Pixar film Ratatouille makes the identical point in a scant, 45 exhilarating, animated seconds. One bite of confit bayaldi (a posher version of the homey dish that gave its name to the movie) and the lonely, self-absorbed critic is vaulted back to his childhood kitchen. A still from the scene appears above.
Professional wine tasters rely on memory and pattern recognition to make judgments about varietal character, winemaking technique, and conformity to a standard. Blank spaces are sketched in provisionally until something recognizable emerges. But, if tasting is a professional skill that can be learned and communicated, why don’t tasters of equal experience always agree? How is it they can be thrown off track when, as experiments have shown, wine is deliberately mislabeled, mispriced, or presented under other false cues?
My guess is that they would agree more and be fooled less if we could bring up the information while leaving the affective elements behind. It just doesn’t seem to work that way. On the other hand, it’s worth noting that for Ego, his quick trip via confit bayaldi to his boyhood table doesn’t cloud or disable his critical faculties; It humanizes them.
I’ll confess to occasionally being dogged by the suspicion that it may have been circumstantial factors — food, company, mood, time of day — rather than something in the glass, that left me thrilled or disappointed with a wine. Now I think I know why.