What’s Neuro gastronomy; a gastropub run by neurologists?
Close. But not really. Wikipedia thinks Neurogastronomy is the study of flavor perception and the ways it affects cognition and memory. Influenced by the psychology and neuroscience of sensation, learning, satiety, and decision making. Here’ s a technical write-up on how olfaction contributes to flavor, taste preferences, and the linguistics of communicating and identifying the flavor. Or enjoy the book ‘Das Parfum’ by Patrick Süskind. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/343.Perfume)
The term neurogastronomy was coined by leading neuroscientist Prof. Dr. Gordon M. Shepherd, who in 2013 wrote “How the brain creates flavor and why it matters”
Prof. Shepherd embarks on a voyage through the “human brain flavor system,” laying the foundations for neurogastronomy as a new scientific field. Prof. Shepherd is with the School of Medicine at Yale University and founder and head of the Shepherd lab: https://medicine.yale.edu/lab/shepherd/
In this book, he connects his research to trends in nutrition, dieting, and obesity, especially the challenges that many faces in eating healthily. His work is all about our perceptions of smell and flavor and their relationship to the neural basis of consciousness.
Hopefully, this book is available in your local bookstore, or on Amazon; the latter promotes: ‘Everyone from casual diners and ardent foodies to wine critics, chefs, scholars, and researchers will delight in Shepherd’s fascinating, scientific- gastronomic adventures’. And if you prefer a Vimeo presentation over a book: https://vimeo.com/254564156
In the UK, the University of Oxford’s Prof. Dr. Charles Spence, professor of experimental psychology and head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory. I read first about Prof. Spence in 2014, when the Ig Nobel Prize for Nutrition was awarded to him and prof. Dr. Massimiliano Zampini for their ear-deafening study on the ‘sonic chip’.
For the few who want to check out the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony
at Harvard University, and its Ig Nobel founder, Marc Abrahams,
who also co-founded Improbable Research: www.improbable.com
Improbable Research’s goal:
Our goal is to make people LAUGH, then THINK. We also hope to
spur people’s curiosity, and to raise the question: How do you
decide what’s important and what’s not, and what’s real
and what’s not — in science and everywhere else?’
A subscription to their free, inspiring blog as is an almost ‘must’
Recipe to better enjoy life…
Anyhow, Prof. Spence is interested in how people perceive the world around them. In particular, how our brains manage to process the information from each of our different senses (such as smell, taste, sight, hearing, and touch) to form the extraordinarily rich multisensory experiences that fill our daily lives. He recorded ‘Talking Tastebuds’ for Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2ivaDKRoHa523WxG4mjZeM