Question Does our mind alter our perception of taste from the way things look and/or previous experiences?

Accepted:
June 20, 2013

Comments

The answer certainly seems to be yes. One example: learning to like something you didn't like at first. (Olives, beer, strong cheese…)

Taste isn't the only sense modality that's subject to these shifts. Most of us, I'd guess, have found that people sometimes come to look different to us as we get to know them well, for example. As we think about our earlier reactions to some musicians and some music, we may be struck by how different the same piece sounds to us now than it once did.

Obviously there are lots of interesting questions we could ask here. It seems plausible that sometimes these shifts are a matter of learning to notice things we didn't focus on at first. But as others have pointed out, this phenomenon raises more peculiarly philosophical questions. Daniel Dennett considers a pair of possibilities that seem maddeningly hard to disentangle: one might say: I used to like parsnips, but they taste different to me now. Or one might say: parsnips taste the same to me as they always did, but I don't like the taste anymore. Just what, if anything, the difference is, and what this tells is about sensory experience are issues that might well reward further attention. Some of the work to be done is almost certainly empirical, but some of it is conceptual and philosophical.

Question Does our mind alter our perception of taste from the way things look and/or previous experiences? Accepted:June 20, 2013

Question Does our mind alter our perception of taste from the way things look and/or previous experiences?

Accepted:
June 20, 2013