(25) everybody its own, just understand it.

By this I mean to talk about taste. We all have the sensation of taste since birth, and we do use it a lot when small as everything goes to the mouth usually, but do we know and understand it when a bit older. This is a bit of a think that we take for granted, and with a little more understanding we could use this a bit better and cleverly. So, I will look at taste in a logical way, and I hope that you will like my way of thinking. (This is part 1 only by the way).

Focus is always needed!

Tonight is going to be a Good Good Night Well, I might ask you to excuse the pun, but I won’t!

For the younger audience these are famous lyrics well worth looking for if you do not know them. My point is just what happened before the group sang this: “I have a feeling”.

If a baby could speak when born he, or she (or whatever), could very well say that as he (…) feels for the first time. This could have been a better title for this chapter as well, but I had decided on something else first, so, now you can choose! Back to our new-born baby.

Obviously, as everybody knows, the first thing that happens is a loud cry: the first breath of fresh air. The baby is made comfortable as much as possible. He inspects his environment and would cry again if he is not satisfied. Why does he do that? Only because in his new surroundings he has no marks yet.

So, after a while, he will feel comfortable by a set of factors acquired since he was born. Then the natural requirements set in, he would cry out if not given to eat, this is something that he has no control over, as well as everything else for that matter anyway.

Nonetheless, his first perceptions about his environment would be based on comfort: temperature and sensations of close contact. So, we can say that touch is dominant. And you will note that stays for a long time as babies have a propensity to touch, grab, and put to their mouth most things around them. They explore and learn, everybody knows that, that is why you need to keep a constant eye on them. A fact of the baby life is his sense of smell. Like many mammals he can recognise his parents by the sense of smell. At any rate he learns, and his brains develops at a prodigious rate (I wish I was still doing it!).

One of the many memories treasured by parents is the first steps of their new baby. However, for this to happen, he will have started to see the world around him, and not near proximity, and acquired a sense of 3D space. By progressive standing up he will start to develop its sense of equilibrium. When you combine the last two you obtain spatial awareness. Observing his environment, he will have noticed, and heard, a lot of people “speaking” to him, or at least making faces and some sort of sounds, mostly what we call baby talk! As stated before he is curious, and he start to try to imitate his parents. So, he starts to speak, baby talk as well!

It will take some time to assimilate all of these inputs, and some cerebral cells as well.

And, of course, our baby grows into a fully formed young human. With all the characteristics of his culture, the social level of his parents, and his education he will have acquired a sense of taste dictated by all theses factors, meaning what he eats every day. We can now resume our little experiment, the baby in question being only fictitious, and we can say with certainty that humans have five senses and different sensations that are near senses.

• Touch

• Smell

• Sight

• Sound

• Taste

• Equilibrium

• Temperature

• Pain

• Spatial awareness

You will notice five senses and four sensory qualities. You might ask why the difference. This is because the second require the first elements to work well, like the brain which controls everything of the human body.

Equilibrium is reached by the combination of a few factors interpreted by impulses coming from the ears, the eyes, and sometimes helped by the sense of touch from the body in general (vibrations).

The quality of the atmosphere is sensed by the skin, which gives us information about the moisture content, and the temperature, which can be detected by a combination of multiple factors of internal bodily functions and the skin and ears as well.

Pain is definitely a sensation, everybody would agree on that, but it depends on too many factors and circumstances to say that this is a proper sense, so this is still a sensation.

Spatial awareness is reached by a combination of the interpretation of visual impulses and information from the ears and sometimes the sense of equilibrium as well.

You’re beautiful

Lyrics again! This time this is from James Blunt, an artist whose song, and I mean this one, was so much on air that it made it awful! There was even some advertising made because of that.

Why would I ever talk about that?

The answer is very simple: when we meet someone, we look at the other person first. If we like what we saw all the better. It is a very rare person indeed who would not judge by looks. We can not avoid it. You might have noticed that just above I wrote “saw”. This is deliberate as I want to emphasize the fact that the eyes see, then the brain analyse, and then the decision on what you see is reached. As with everything concerned with the brain, or almost everything, both sides of the brain interpret the visual impulses coming from the eyes. The left eye input goes to the right side of the brain, and vice versa. However, the central vision goes to both sides and the correlation between the two sides gives the sense of 3D vision. This gives us the ability to judge distance, and therefore speed when movement is concerned. Height can be misjudged but we see better in “widescreen”.

So, we see, we look, and we do a lot of that. In fact, we can not escape the fact that we always, at least when awake, interpret what our eyes tell us about our environment, consciously or not. And this last point is important.

When you consider a cheese shop for example consider the first thing that you see. Usually, it is the front of the shop. There would be sign of course, but otherwise, and as always if you see what you like you will look into it. Which really means that you will give a second look.

You just have made a judgement, a choice. So, let say that the frontage of the shop is pleasant to you, may be based on your culture and the fact that there is no aggressive colour, you will enter and investigate. Normally, for a westerner, you will look from right to left at eye level. And then you will interact with these new surroundings. But more about cheese shop later on.

There are many misconceptions and interpretations given to us through our eyes and the way we interpret the information is all too important.

The next part will come in the coming weeks, I hope that you enjoyed this beginning.

And remember, as always, give life to your taste buds, and above all, enjoy real cheese.