Tastes of Tomorrow
Image: 19th-century engraving of Goethe’s Faust and Homunculus Excerpted from Thinking, Hard and Soft Part 1: Hume and the Middleman Raise your wine glass! Odorant molecules rise from the liquid and pass through your nasal passage before reaching a patch of neurons with hair-like extensions. A biochemical reaction sends an olfactory signal to the centre of emotion, your brain’s limbic system. That’s just the start. Drink! Your sensory experience deepens. Onion-shaped structures called taste buds containing up to 100 taste receptor cells, again with neuronal properties, pass more information about the wine’s chemical qualities to your brain. Waves of information hit your consciousness as your “brain” processes them. How much of this are you aware of? You struggle to come up with more than a few words: red fruit, stale cardboard, mushrooms on a forest floor and ladybug taint. All that information. All those neurons. And the best that you can do is stand by and take a few notes. It seems a bit disappointing. David Hume was a great theorist of impressions and ideas. According to Hume, impressions are like pictures …