The Taste Science Laboratory - About taste: what is taste?

Edward Bradford Titchener

Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927) popularized the notion of four basic tastes in his best-selling textbook, ìAn Outline of Psychology,î first published in 1896. He noted: ìTaste has four qualities and no more. Smell seems to have a very large number of qualities.î

Titchener's teacher was Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), a German physician who is considered the father of experimental psychology. Wundt's major work lay in the study of perception. His approach to exporing perception was to have subjects experience a stimulus and then describe their experience in a directed and systematic way, an approach called experimental introspection. In this way Wundt arrived at the idea that there are only four basic tastes.

Upon completion of his PhD with Wundt in 1892, Titchener was invited to become Chairman of the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. Through his teaching, papers, and textbooks, he became one of the most influential psychologists in America at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. His major contribution was his insistance that psychology was a science, not a branch of philosophy.

At Cornell he developed an experiment-based psychology curriculum that emphasized new discovery and experimentation over rote memorization and repetition of the work of others. He expected students to participate in his laboratory for the study of sensory perception, which was specially designed to explore all the senses: vision, hearing, touch, and our sense of time, as well as taste and smell.

As was the case for his mentor, Wundt, Titchener's approach to understanding the human mind involved introspection. He believed that all mental experience was accesible to the conscious mind, an approach that went out of vogue as Freud popularized the idea that there is a subconscious mind that was accessible to introspection only with difficulty and after prolonged analysis.

Our research in the Taste Science Laboratory is an elaboration on and an extension of Titchener's approach, informed by the extraordinary developments in neuroscience since Titchener's time, coupled with the explicit recognition that phenomena occur in the mind that are not directly accessible to consciousness, but are nevertheless expressed consciously.

What is taste?

The American Heritage Dictionary tells us that taste is:

ì1.a. the sense that distinguishes the sweet, sour, salty, and bitter qualities of dissolved substances in contact with the taste buds on the tongue."
"b. This sense in combination with the senses of smell and touch, which together receive a sensation of a substance in the mouth.î

Taste by the first definition

In its first definition, the American Heritage Dictionary limits the tastes perceived by the taste buds to four; in fact there are at least six ó in addition to the classic four, there are the taste of fat, and a taste called umami. ìUmamiî means delicious in Japanese, and is the word for the savory taste of meat. In this way, our taste buds are designed to tell us about the nutritional qualities of the food we eat: sweet for ripe fruit and carbohydrates, sour for unripe fruit and vitamin C, salty for salt and other minerals, bitter for poisonous plants, umami for protein, and fat forÖfat!

Taste by the second definition

The second definition, which includes smell and touch, is the one most people have in mind when they talk about the taste of a food ó taste, in this sense, means flavor.

Smell - better than any of the other components of flavor - allows us to determine the specific food we are eating, for example to distinguish a lemon from a lime. In fact most people can distinguish among 1000 odors, and perfumers among as many as 10 000!

The sense of touch provides us with information about the texture or ìmouthfeelî of a food. Texture includes both the slipperiness of an oyster and the fizz and prickle of a carbonated beverage.

This sense of touch is joined by the ability to feel temperature and pain. Amazingly, menthol activates the tongueís nerve endings in the same way that cold temperatures do, which is why we can talk about the coolness of a mint; and jalapeÒos activate these nerve endings in the same way as do heat and pain, so talking about the ìburnî of chili peppers is right on the mark!

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