The flavor, king of the senses

Sample of gastronomic products at the Flavor Fair held in Malaga last week. MÁLAGA COUNCIL (Europa Press)

To Andoni Luis Aduriz, chef at Mugaritz

Every time a good diner sits at the table in an accredited restaurant, the billions of neurons in his brain have already started to "boil", like the broths that await him on the stove.

Your eyes and ears will be scrutinizing information from the environment for a long time, and your brain and mind will be evaluating it.

When the waiters begin to serve you, it will require the participation of all your senses, because the experience will be complete.

Obviously, your first impression of the delicacies will enter the retina of your eyes. You will love the way you present them and when you bring them to your nose and insert them into your mouth, you will capture their smells and tastes thanks to the millions of ultrasensitive neurons in your nostrils, the different parts of your tongue, your palate and even your pharynx. You may have noticed that your abilities to smell and taste do not lose strength over the years. This is so, among other things, because the neurons that serve us to smell and taste are part of chemical senses that have a lot of daily wear and tear, so they are frequently renewed and replaced by others throughout life. Olfactory neurons have a half-life of sixty days and taste neurons do not last much more than ten.

Then, in your mouth and on your tongue, you will notice the touch and texture of each food, its roughness or smoothness, its temperature, and even a burning and even pleasant sensation when you taste acidic substances such as lemon juice or chilli. This carrier is capsaicin, a substance that excites neurons in the trigeminal nerve, the same, with forgiveness, that causes toothache. But, coming back to the table, be sure to also pay attention to the sound that results from chewing food, such as when you gnaw on a raw carrot or a crunchy potato chip, or, surprisingly enough and as the young entrepreneurs at Cowiners suggest, repair also in the sound that the wine produces when it is poured over the glass, since your ear, which is close to your jaws, will pick up all those sounds to incorporate them,without your realizing it, to your overall perceptual experience.

If there is someone at the table who works more than those who serve him, it is his brain, particularly a very special part of it, the frontal orbital cortex, the one located in his most anterior lobe, just above the orbits of the eyes. In the complex neural circuits of this part of the brain, all the sensory properties of food are combined: its colors, smells, tastes, temperature, textures and sounds. And from that complete combination comes taste, one of the most powerful conscious experiences in the human brain. The perception of flavor transcends that of its components, since it is not a simple sum of senses, but much more than that. When the shape, color, texture, temperature and sound of what we test are added to the smell and taste, the frontal orbital cortex of the brain brings out the flavor,the sublime perception, subjective and personal like everything conscious, that elevates the culinary art.

The first cells called to become neurons appeared in marine beings, perhaps in sponges, in the Cambrian geological period, about 500 million years ago, but only about 60 million years ago, in primates, did the prefrontal part begin to develop The brain, which functions as the conductor of the conscious mind, directs our thoughts and makes us human and intelligent.

Isn't it great that the sense of taste is based precisely on the most noble and developed part of the human brain?

Ignacio Morgado Bernal

Gray matter

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