Edward’s Diary Entry 82: The Five Senses: 4. “Tasting” is more substantial

“I believe the reason why the Chinese failed to develop botany and zoology is that the Chinese scholar cannot stare coldly and unemotionally at a fish without immediately thinking of how it tastes 

in the mouth and wanting to eat it.” 

Lin Yutang, from “The Importance of Living”

There is understanding through words and understanding through the belly, and the saying about conquering a man through his stomach is part of this. But when it comes to this 4th sense called tasting, we see a curious thing with respect to “time”.

If we put our “five-sense” study onto a timeline, we find the following rates of usage:

- The eyes capture data all day long when we’re awake, say 16 hours a day, and they still seem to work overtime in REM sleep, albeit internally.

- The ears are also on a full workday, like the eyes, but they seem to rest better than the eyes at night.

- The olfactory channel, however, with its nose, only does a half day’s job when we’re awake: it’s only on the in-breath that it can potentially smell! 

- The mouth, with its capacity for taste, is mostly off duty during the day, unless you’re a binger or compulsive eater, as you only taste when you eat your meals or snacks or have your drinks – or chew gum! And remember, taste is smelling’s little brother: when you have a cold or a stuffy nose, you can lose your taste, because you can’t smell anymore, and you only notice textures!

- Then when it comes to touching, this is actually quite infrequent during the day with animate objects, although maybe quite frequent with inanimate objects (at work or play), and even obsessively recurrent with today’s cell phone use!  But remember... the deepest kind of “touching” – sex – is quite “infrequent” during the whole week! Durex says “Greece tops the list of having the most sex on a weekly basis at 87%. Brazil and Russia sit high on the list at 82% and 80%, respectively. Just over half the people in the US have weekly sex at 53%. Japanese are least likely to have weekly sex at 34%.” And 73% of the Spanish are "once-a-weekers", according to El Mundo.

So before we come all the way down to Earth with physical “touching”, tasting is the sense that definitely needs substance or material in a particular place, the oral orifice, and this is what I mean by it being much more “substantial” and physical, although “aftertaste” may well be a result of the olfactory pathway.

The scientific descriptions of taste are all quite interesting, and have been duly chopped down into their constituent parts, with detailed descriptions of receptor cells, nuclei, nerves and parts of the brain, along with all the molecules, atoms and DNA required for such functioning. But still, how Life gives You a taste of something and how You interpret it is just as much a mystery as any other sensorial input. Dissection tells us about parts and microscopic details and chemical reactions, but it doesn’t say 1) why things taste different anyway, or how exactly they taste to certain people, different societies or to other species of animals; and 2) how these things interact in the mouth and sinuses to produce their tastes, flavours and aromas, and even aftertastes, and 3) how all this information gets into Consciousness and is dealt with in the mind. How does material enter awareness as taste and increase our Self-Awareness?

Is this making some sense, or do I just have a taste for the bizarre? Well... wait a bit till we review all "five senses" and then look for the sixth sense...