Why Flavor is an Illusion - The Liberating Truth
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Your brain has created the most remarkable illusion. It has convinced you that flavor is an observable, tangible, physical thing, and it exists within the whisky in your glass. So strong is this illusion, that no doubt you will be thinking that I am talking utter nonsense. But if you wish to understand whisky flavor on a whole new level, forget what you think you know, and embrace an open mind for the duration of this lesson.
What’s in the glass is just a collection of molecules. Flavor is in fact a lie – a brilliant, beautiful illusion created entirely by your brain. But don’t worry, this isn’t bad news. In fact, it’s one of the most liberating concepts when tasting whisky. Join me in this lesson where we’ll discover not just why flavor is an illusion, but also why this will transform your whisky appreciation game.
Flavor as a System
The first step is to understand a seemingly simple question: what is flavor? You may have heard many different answers, but the simple one is that flavor is perception derived from the sensory inputs of smell, taste, and mouthfeel sensations. But did you spot the most important word here?
The crucial element that is often overlooked is ‘perception’. While the sensory receptors interact with the molecules in the whisky, their role is to only produce a neural signal. It’s impossible to read an email by peering down a fiberoptic cable. A computer is required to make sense of the signal. Likewise, without a brain to decode neural signals they are meaningless information.
Therefore, flavor is a type of perception that is generated from multiple sensory inputs. It is a system that harnesses not just smell, taste, and mouthfeel, but also vision, sound, and touch too. So the whisky in your glass is just stimuli in the form of molecules, which on their own are not flavor. Only once they interact with all your senses can your brain take the information and create the perception of flavor. But there’s more.
Flavor as a Shapeshifter
To further prove the point that flavor only exists in the brain let’s look at its shifting nature. Think about your favorite bottle of whisky. Have you ever poured a dram of it but it didn’t seem quite as good as the last time you tried it? Or have you ever taken a sip and it seemed exceptionally delicious? So what has changed – is it the whisky or you?
We each have different thresholds for flavors. A threshold is the minimum concentration of a substance in a mixture that you can detect. You may have a high threshold for coconut, which means you find it hard to identify. Or you may have a low threshold for sulfur, which means you are very sensitive to it. But your thresholds change daily – even hourly. Why?
There are lots of elements that alter your thresholds – fatigue, emotional state, hunger, stress, hormones, enzymes, natural biome, the coffee you had 30 minutes ago. They all impact how you experience the flavor of the next thing you eat or drink. This is why peated whiskies always come at the end of tastings.
The enzymes, microbiota, temperature, and saliva within your mouth will alter the whisky too. As soon as you take a sip, these all react with the spirit to make chemical changes. So essentially the whisky has become a different product to when it was in the glass. What this all means is that the perception of flavor is constantly in a state of flux.
We can also add to the mix things such as experience and expectation. Your prior flavor experiences set expectations in your mind. These expectations begin to shape flavor perception even before you’ve taken a sip. Studies have demonstrated the profound impact of such psychological cues as pricing, coloring, and packaging design. But what does this all mean to you?
Flavor as Liberation
Because your sense of vision is strongly connected to odor perception, your brain maps the image of a dram of whisky to the flavor experience. If I ask you to imagine the smell of a banana, automatically you will also picture the image of a banana in your mind. Hence, the brain connects images and flavors, providing the illusion that they are one and the same. But as we have seen, the whisky is just the source of the flavor, not flavor itself.
By combining multi-sensory inputs and layering them with emotion, meaning, and expectation, the brain creates a novel experience that is unique to you and you alone – flavor. Flavor, as defined as a form of perception, cannot therefore exist anywhere other than in your mind. What this means, though, is liberating.
When it comes to describing flavor there’s no such thing as a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. If someone says their whisky tastes like leather-bound books and you taste burnt toast, neither of you are incorrect. Your brains are simply constructing different versions of reality from the same stimuli.
This is why The Scotch Malt Whisky Society embraces the idiosyncrasies, peculiarities, and anomalies of flavor perception as a personal adventure with no right or wrong answers. But nonetheless, an adventure that’s shared with like-minded members. That’s the fun of it. To delve even deeper into the fascinating science of flavor, head over to The Sensory Advantage and get ready to explore.
