Neuroscience is interesting. But when it comes to perception, the temptation is to go too far, and fall into the subjectivity trap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s\noften claimed that the brain creates flavour. And I realize that I have stated\nthis in the past \u2013 in particular, in the book on wine tasting that I wrote, I\nTaste Red. The thing is, technically it is true. But it\u2019s often accompanied by\na headlong rush to subjectivity that is unhelpful, and perhaps even misguided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The\nperception you have of the outside world is merely a model of reality, created\nby your brain. This is why we take so long to develop as babies into children,\nand then into adults. As well as growing physically, our brains are developing\na robust, useful model of the world around us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\nlearn about \u2018objects\u2019 and their properties, behaviours and various features.\nThis is the currently trendy topic of machine learning. AI is finally doing\nwhat we do in our brains: learning about the world and accumulating enough data\nto be able to model reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\nneed to model reality \u2013 and by this I mean create our own version of reality\nthat is then informed by what is out there \u2013 because there is simply so much\ndata coming in from our senses that we can\u2019t process it quickly, or even make\nsense of it. In order to be able to respond to the world fast enough, we need\nto have a model running that is then informed by what we encounter. This is the\nonly way we can deal with the information coming in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This\nis quite a hard concept to get your head around, I know. But it\u2019s clear from\ndreams and hallucinations that the brain is capable of constructing a version\nof reality, and this can be completely dissociated from the reality that we are\nencountering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\nit means is that none of us have direct access to reality. In terms of\nperception, each of us is living in our own world: one that we have created.\nWhat we perceive is a heavily edited version of what is out there, and it\u2019s\nsomething our brain has constructed and is personal to us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As\nyou taste wine, you are experiencing a construction of flavour, made up by your\nbrain, which is personal to you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The\nleap that many now make is to say that this destroys any objectivity. If our\nperception is private, and is a model of reality, not a direct experience of\nreality itself, then surely all perception, and with it all taste, is\nsubjective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\nthink this is unhelpful. For a start, while it is technically true that we\ncreate our own reality, unless there is a pretty tight correspondence between\nour model and what is actually out there, we won\u2019t last long. Crossing the road\nwill probably be lethal. When you stub your toe, it feels pretty real. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While\nit is really interesting to understand how we perceive (and I think this goes a\nlong way to answering the problem of consciousness), it isn\u2019t very useful in\npractice. If we look at how we behave, we consider our perception of the world\nto be a direct representation of reality. As long as our senses are functioning\nmore or less normally, then we don\u2019t have to give up on objectivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\nwas walking the other day and it felt cold. \u2018It is a cold day,\u2019 I said to\nmyself. But isn\u2019t perception subjective? Perhaps not everyone would agree that\nit was cold. But no one contests the statement, \u2018It is a cold day,\u2019 because\nwhen it\u2019s a cold day, we tend to all agree about this description of the\nweather. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In\nwine, there will always be disagreements as we taste together. But the amazing\nthing is how often we do agree about wines, especially when tasting wine is\nsuch a complicated business, using senses such as taste and smell for which we\nhave poor vocabularies. In the wine trade, while many people say \u2018it\u2019s all\nsubjective, like what you like\u2019 \u2013 that is not how they behave. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite\nthe well charted individual differences in taste and smell (which I think have\nbeen somewhat overstated), we behave in the wine trade as if taste is\nobjective. If you have a roughly normal sense of flavour, then as we taste together,\nwe are likely to be tasting the same wine and we\u2019ll probably pick up similar\nproperties. There\u2019s an issue with our communication \u2013 words for wine are hard\nto do well \u2013 but we assume that the perception is a shared one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The biological differences in flavour perception are real. But we aren\u2019t measuring devices. Our knowledge and experience will also be shaping our perception. But as we taste together we are all trying to get the wine. Sometimes we get it better than others. And on different occasions we see different aspects of the wine. Our behaviour shows us that we believe that there is something real that we are straining to get: the objective flavour of the wine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n