Sensual Intelligence - 4: Your Mouth

I've just got back from taking an assembley for Year 1 & 2 pupils during a 'Green Week' that the school have organised. We looked at various photos of locally common birds, and I encouraged the children to look closely and really appreciate the different colours of the birds the next time they saw them, rather than just glancing at them and missing the beauty in front of their eyes. That's what this series, taken from a chapter in Tony Buzan's book, Head First, has been about: increasing our sensory awareness.

This morning I'm thinking about taste, which I - for one - take for granted.....until, that is, your learn facts like these:

• Your mouth contains up to 10,000 super-sensitive taste buds.
• These 10,000 taste buds can detect sweet flavours at one part per 200; salt at one part per 400; sour at one part per 130,000; and bitter at one part per 2,000,000!
• The taste buds combine with your olfactory system to allow you to distinguish millions of different tast sensations.
  

Buzan tells of a fascinating piece of research that picks up on the old question of whether it's 'proper' or 'better' to pour the milk or the tea first into the cup. Some time ago a group of tea drinkers got into a major argument about it; those who said that the milk should be put in first insisted that they could always tell the difference. It was decided to put them to the test.

To everybody's amazement, the tea drinkers were nearly 100% accurate in identifying which liquid had been put in first. In order to find out exactly how they did this, researchers decided to find out exactly what happens when either milk or tea is poured first. They filmed the process of pouring milk into tea and tea into milk, and then played it back in slow motion.
They observed that no matter how fast the liquid was poured in, a few drops always raced to the head of the tea-fall or the milk-fall, and entered the other liquid first. When the first few drops of milk entered the boiling cup of tea, they were immediately burnt before the remaining volume of milk could plunge in and cool the liquid down. These tiny drops gave a very delicate burnt/singed milk tinge to the taste of the tea. In contrast, when the tiny boiling drops of tea hit the giant cool lake of milk, they were immediately cooled and none of the milk was burnt.

The tea tasters were right - the incredible human body and its senses triumphed once again!

Once again, Buzan suggest some exercises to help us grow in our awareness of this sense of taste:

• Experiment with dishes from as many different nations as you can. Not only will this widen the 'intelligence' of your palette, it will simultaneously increase the intelligence of your olfactory system.
• Regularly prepare foods with many different textures.
• Care for your mouth, tongue and gums with regular check-ups and daily brushing and flossing, done correctly,
• Where appropriate, eat food with your hands. Your hands are an advanced monitoring system for your stomach, and their millions of touch receptors will alert your entire digestive system to the forthcoming pleasures. Eating with your hands will also provide the essential natural oils for the skin of your hands, lips and face.
• If you drink alcohol, develop your wine-tasting skills.
  

Wine tasters tend to use common words and phrases to describe the different tastes of wines, such as 'sweet', 'dry', 'heavy', 'lemony', 'nutty', 'sharp', 'sticky', 'fruity' etc. Try to find new and imaginative ways of explaining what your mouth really feels:
"This wine tastes as clean as a bird's song sounds."
"This wine is so full bodied that it feels as if it should be eaten rather than drunk!"
"This wine grabs the back of my throat like a ferret grabbing its prey!"

Of course, you don't have to limit yourself to describing wines - try anything else that you can think of: cheeses, breads, chocolates, whatever!