The Surprising Science of How We "Taste" Food | National Geographic

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75 to 95% of what we call taste is really smell. When we perceive the flavors of food, it really feels like the experience is there in your mouth, and yet, in fact, it's your brain kind of playing tricks on you in a way. Neurogastronomy is the study of the brain on flavor.

Flavor is one of the most multi-sensory of all our experiences. From the sound of crunching and crackling, through the smell in your nose, together with the taste that you experience in your mouth—bitter, sweet, salty, sour—even the visual appearance, all of these cues get brought together. Our brain glues them into our mouth.

Our expectations about what something's going to taste like are set first by what we see. My brain will guess that if I see something red, it's probably going to be sweet; if it's something green, more likely to be sour; black is probably bitter; and that white is salty.

Tastes and flavors also have shapes attached. Exactly the same dessert might taste 10% sweeter when served on a round white plate than, say, an angular black plate. You might think of it as illusion; some might call it trickery. But can some of the insights be used in order to help to reduce the sugar, the salt, the fat, and create a sustainable food culture in the future?

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