Nov

7

Uncommon Sense.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 7, 2007 |

Conventional wisdom holds that there are four tastes: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. The other day on NPR, though, it was reported that there’s a fifth taste, one that’s a little harder to define but which is currently being called “umami”, which is a Japanese word meaning “deliciousness”. And it’s fitting that it would be given a Japanese name since it was a Japanese chemist who broke the flavor down into its component parts and determined that it really was a taste all its own.

In fact the sense of taste seems to have been largely unexamined since Democritus (b.460 BC, died 370 BC) declared that sour, sweet, salty, and bitter, were the only flavors and that even the most complex flavors must be a combination of those four. Personally I’m happy that a fifth flavor has been added. How in the world would you classify something that tastes smoky, for instance? Is it sweet? Salty? Bitter? It’s surprising that, while so many of the ideas about the natural world cherished by the ancient Greek philosophers would be eventually found to be incorrect, primarily during the Renaissance, but no one’s examined taste until recently. Descartes and Newton could observe that a cannonball fired from a cannon would travel in an arc, contrary to Aristotle’s belief that it would travel in a straight line. Four-hundred years after the revolutions in astronomy and physics spurred by Galileo and the invention of calculus medicine’s still behind the curve.

Thinking of the senses always reminds me of synesthesia, a strange condition in which more than one sense is stimulated at a time. Someone with synesthesia might literally see sound, for instance. Vladimir Nabokov, for one, was synesthetic; as a child he told his grandmother that his alphabet blocks were the wrong colors. For him each sound had a corresponding color. Scientists believe about one in two-thousand people is a synesthete. Surprisingly not all synesthetes are artists, but a fair number of artists, writers, and especially poets seem to have had synesthesia.

For a fairly technical but still entertaining look at synesthesia, check out The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Dr. Richard Cytowic. Also interesting is Patricia Lynne Duffy’s Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens, the first book written by a synesthete about the experience.

Also check out The Synesthetic Experience, which includes a Virtual Synethesia experience.


Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. Joell on November 7, 2007 10:31 am

    I heard an episode of The Infinite Mind, back when that excellent show was on Nashville Public Radio, on this topic. Very interesting stuff! You can check it out at http://www.lcmedia.com/mind462.htm

  2. Uncommon Sense. — Biography. writers and their biography on December 5, 2007 1:16 pm

    [...] into its component parts and determined that it really was a taste all its own. In fact source: Uncommon Sense., Just [...]

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