[prologue, setup, hook?]
You come into my shop, I greet you, you ask what smells good, I tell you it is a special winter drink, you ask if you can see, I ask if you want to try some, you say yes, I pour you an ounce, you drink it and say that my hot apple cider is good. I did not serve you hot apple cider.
[intro, hypothesis]
The world of wine has a lot in common with art or fashion. Truth mixed perceptions, advertising mixed with sales, and news headlines of outrageous gimmicks mixed with huge sales. I have seen the situation in the above paragraph so many times now, it has confounded me. I theorize that that the suggestion of a flavor, even if it doesn’t exist in someone’s drink, will make them taste it! You might think that it is crazy to taste something that doesn’t exist; but you aren’t safe from such craziness because its human psychology, and you are human.
[Definition clarity]
[Clarity on tasting]
Under normal circumstances, people taste with a combination of their nose and their tongue. The tongue gathers information on the taste of food & drink: Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami.
Our tongue is covered in tastebuds which is a simple way to say that we have receptors that tell our brain what we are experiencing once certain molecules from food come in contact. Depending on the food we eat, our receptors can send signals of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, or umami to our brain.
Umami, for those unfamiliar, was discovered by Kikunae Ikeda and was the most recently acknowledged taste, now taught in textbooks. Umami roughly translates into English as “delicious” and refers to a “savory” “meaty” “brothy” experience such as in mushrooms, soy sauce, tomatoes, and tuna.
Also, that infamous “map of the tongue” from a decade or two ago is a misnomer, specific tastes are not limited to regions on the tongue. We have the ability to taste the big five all over our tongue.
[Definition on suggestion]
Before we go any further, I want to clarify the word suggestion. You may not think much about the word outside of “suggesting it was Colonel Mustard in the ballroom with the candle stick” while playing Clue, however suggestion I believe has a larger scope than most think. What is suggestion? To most people it is a proposal, or a way to imply a fact. In a psychological sense, suggestion is the action or process of calling up an idea or thought in someone’s mind by associating it with other things. This definition is key in understanding this taste phenomenon and comes from an entire field of study called the power of suggestion. Moreover, suggestion can come from not only spoken words, but it can also come from unspoken visual cues such as the art used on the packaging of a product.
[going deeper into suggestion]
We come into contact with an inordinate amount of suggestions every day. The red octagonal sign on the road up ahead, a suggestion to stop. The date circled on your calendar to meet a friend, a suggested time to meet. The way someone phrases a question “Which candidates if you were to rank them do you dislike more?”, suggests that even the candidate you like, you dislike to some degree by including them in your ranking in the first place.
Take for example, that you walk into a grocery store this time of year and see a depiction of a perfectly baked thanksgiving turkey on a dinner table surrounded by a happy family; easily visible in a corner of the image is the logo of the grocery store you are in. What is the suggestion? “A turkey from this grocery store will make your family happy!” would be a good answer. It is most likely not a coincidence that within a few steps of this displayed image, there are an abundance of festively wrapped turkeys in a large refrigerated display shelf. This example is one of the most obvious forms of suggestion that you can easily see.
[The situation revisited]
Let us revisit the situation, you enter the shop and the first thing you smell is cinnamon. It is cold outside, so I offer you this hot drink. The only hot drink you are familiar with is apple cider, due to its popularity at fall festivals. This sets expectations for what you are about to experience. The cinnamon aroma from the drink has associations in your mind with apples, this further reinforces your expectations. You have now been primed to taste apples via suggestion. I have not explicitly suggested it, but your senses and your experience have. This is what causes a large portion of people to think they are drinking hot apple cider when in fact they are drinking hot red wine: also known as Glühwein, Glögg, or Mulled Spice.
[A similar situation] [Causal]
This is not unheard of. In fact Frédéric Brochet wrote a dissertation that was an embarrassment to wine snobs everywhere. A trick as simple as dying white wine red in color, had convinced judges that a white wine a bold red. The judges were completely fooled, and wine tasting as a legitimate institution was called into question.
Brochet came to the conclusion that vision for evolutionary reasons gets our priority as it could help us spot danger, while other senses such as smell, are processed much slower. He also points out that the illusion of perception is real. The judges appeared to be basing their appraisals of the wine off of color. Furthermore, Brochet points out that there is a disconnect between language and smell: “The fact that there are no specific terms to describe odors supports the idea of a defective association between odor and language. Odors take the name of the objects that have these odors.”
[Rebuttal]
There are a couple of other situations people might imagine.
[The peer pressure trap]
It could be argued that the people I have encountered were under pressure, such as a judge. However, for one, they are not judging anything, and for two many times it is in a nearly empty store. There is no one to impress. One could try to argue I am someone to impress, however this does not account for when I walk away after giving out a small sample of the mulled wine and leave the guest alone with the drink to come to their own conclusions. When I come back to chat, they ask me earnestly what it was they drank and if it was cider.
[The atrophying vocabulary] [The I don’t drink wine]
Some people just do not have the vocabulary to explain what they mean. They often confuse sour for bitter. They simply just need a refresher on tastes and perhaps an introduction to some lingo to express more complicated things in tasting.
[Perhaps they were confused]
You might say perhaps they were confused in a general sense. This is not the case. Every person I have met remarks in a similar way, that they can pick up flavors of cinnamon and nutmeg, but not the underlying taste. Everyone was in control of their senses. It is precisely because of this that they believed what their senses and intuition told them.
[Perhaps they saw you or a label with apples.]
You might think that perhaps they were confused, and maybe they saw a bottle label with apples. No, the bottle is not visible and the drink is served from crockpot. Further emphasizing the strange psychology that is associative then leading to suggesting expectations.
[close]
As you can see here, psychology can be a strange thing. We can be fooled by our senses and expectations much like how a magician messes with them. Our senses of sight and smell can be fooled by presentation. Our impressions of others by looking at how they present themselves can be just as deceiving. It is done not explicitly but subtlety via suggestions. The power is in its subtilty, as we are not able to put up our defenses for things we can not see coming.
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 