Food Republic points out an interesting phenomenon in its review of a book called Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating. Taste, it seems, is not just dependent on smell, but also on sight.

For example, a mouthwash manufacturer told me that their orange variant didn’t taste as astringent to people as their regular blue variety, despite the formulation of the active ingredients staying the same. It makes no sense until you learn something about the rules of multisensory integration governing how the brain combines the senses. Here, I am thinking of “sensory dominance” — where the brain uses one sense to infer what is going on in the others.

I’ve always found color theory to be fascinating, but I’ve never considered that “taste theory” might also be a field of study.

While everyone’s tastebuds are slightly different, and everyone has their own preferences in how certain things taste (some people like a lot of salt or spice, some don’t), I’ve always considered the majority of taste to be a mechanical thing.

It makes sense that smell is involved, since the nose is so directly connected to the mouth, and the smell of a food is usually related to the taste of that food. Except for Hot Pockets, the Biggest Lie.

Likewise, the sense of touch plays in to the taste of food because things like texture, mouthfeel, and temperature can also effect taste. You can taste a difference between cold brew and hot brew coffee, or a hot or cold chocolate chip cookie.

But it appears that sight plays a big part as well, and not just in the “we eat with our eyes first” sense. Sure, a meal can be beautiful, but not everything is. I don’t gaze in awe at my bottle of mouthwash.

What I find especially fascinating about this intersection between taste and our other senses is how the brain mediates between them. It makes the “truth” of a taste that much harder to get at–and knowing that our brain is running a bunch of interference with our other senses alongside can mean that it would be nearly impossible for us to get at the “truth of taste.”

That’s not a problem for people who just want to eat dinner, but I’m thinking about people who taste wine for a living or even food critics–maybe getting a better presentation DOES make the food taste better.

And that’s not even getting into nostalgia, memory, or expectation.

Gastrophysics is going on my to-read list.