Synaesthesia Magazine Eat | Page 26

n’t do that. Instead, ew. Our brain ubes, spheres, flat of a moving object – et us build a e in our heads that or catch a ball. These things we can talk to there are elements e find impossible to oncept of red. hilosophers) refer to completely subjective ur you see, a texture r. There is no way ption of red feels the lse’s. Felix Cohen runs the Manhattans Project, an occasional cocktail residency in and around east London. He's been bartending for over a decade, and also makes websites when he's not making drinks (and has rent to pay!). He likes whiskey most of all. >> Wine tasting is fascinating to watch; people taste various different wines and wax lyrical about all the flavours they perceive; something is vanilla-y, has notes of stone fruits, finishes with a note of leather, and so on. But only expert wine tasters tend to say: this tastes like Beaujolais. When people taste wine, they pull it apart into other flavours they already know, and it takes an expert to look at that ‘constellation’ of other flavours and reassemble it into an identifiable wine. It’s the same when we talk about food; ‘it tastes like chicken’ is a tired trope, but only because we need to say it all the time. Everything tastes like something else, but we don’t tend to talk about taste in terms of what psychologists call primitives. Instead, we cast about for likenesses. When we see, we don’t do that. Instead, we have a ‘gestalt’ view. Our brain identifies things like cubes, spheres, flat surfaces or the path of a moving object – basic functions that let us build a comprehensible scene in our heads that lets us sit on a chair or catch a ball. These primitives tend to be things we can talk to each other about, but there are elements of our senses that we find impossible to talk about, like the concept of red. Psychologists (and philosophers) refer to these as qualia: the completely subjective impressions of a colour you see, a texture you touch or a flavour. There is no way to know if your perception of red feels the same as somebody else’s. “ there are elements of our senses that we find impossible to talk about, like the concept of RED