"Audio extra: Test yourself, can you taste the sounds?

Oxford University psychologist Charles Spence studies human senses and how they interact. In recent studies, he had people smell wines and sample chocolate, and then match the different aromas and flavors to different musical sounds.

He found that people tend to associate sweet tastes with high-pitched notes and the sounds of a piano. People match bitter flavors with low notes and brass instruments.

Spence wondered if he could put this finding to use. Could he use music to influence what people smell or taste?"

"Looking, really looking, at art (some might say seeing…feeling) is like this: It is like all the other really amazing things in life…You do it too much & you forget how good it can actually be…you become jaded. You don’t get enough & it is all you can think about—the good & the bad. Then, there is one photo…drawing…performance & you want to know all there is to know about it…It is a little bit like falling in love. It’s best, most exciting, when you don’t know why you like something…the thing you are looking at is something you might usually be inclined to dislike…But, with this, you cannot stop looking, cannot stop thinking. And so, in every other thing that you think about, talk about, read about, talk about, read about, you start to see it in all of those other things, whether or not they, directly, have anything to do with that thing you are suddenly, entirely, falling for…all of those other things have changed. And everything that you thought you knew is no longer the same."

"If the world overwhelms you with its constant production of useless crap which you filter more and more to things that only interest you can I calmly suggest that you just create things that you like & cut out the rest of the world as a middle-man to your happiness?
From where I sit creating things does the following:

Let’s you filter to something you like…Frees you…Makes you happy…Plays to strengths not weaknesses…

I can’t say it better than _why [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff ]: "when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

…

If you quiet your mind & allow yourself to stop judging everything you will find that you have more potential for innovation (at work, in the kitchen…with your hobbies…your thoughts) than you thought before. You were using the same brutal quality filter on yourself that you used on viral videos, talk radio, and blog posts. You deserve better."

"For Lyra, just turned 6, this rapid-fire show is bewitching in its complexity — the epitome, she thinks, of sophisticated viewing. She watches “Phineas and Ferb” aspirationally, as a sort of challenge to herself. She’s trying as hard as she can to adopt the knowing, self-aware manner of story-watching that older children already have…<br />
My aspirational viewing is different in its particulars from Lyra’s, but we both embrace unfamiliar viewing experiences even though — or because — we struggle to understand them. We both yearn: Lyra to be 8 years old; me to experience culture at an ever more elevated level."

"Sometimes people ask me about how I created my little media empire. This is how.<br />
Ira spent 20 years working at NPR before he started This American Life. Twenty years making mistakes, learning from them, thinking about what he’d do with his own show. When he started This Life, NPR turned him down. After 20 years. Told him to do it on his own. So he went out and won some fucking Peabodys.<br />
The day Ira told me he enjoyed a particular episode of my stupid comedy podcast that I didn’t even know he’d every heard of much less listened to was one of the proudest days of my life. For serious.<br />
And speaking of serious: SERIOUSLY, MAKE YOUR THING."

"These are precisely the skills you need if you’re interested in dominating a global market in commodity communication devices, as Nokia did for the fourteen years of the Jorma Ollila era. But the company utterly failed to anticipate, understand or organize itself to deal with the critical thing that happened at the cusp of the Ollila-Kalasvuo transition. This was that you could no longer think of mobile phones as communication devices. You had to conceive of them as interface objects through which users would experience content and command functionality that ultimately lived on the network. … the value-engineering mindset that’s so crucial to profitability as a commodity trader is fatal as a purveyor of experiences. … It’s just not particularly wise to allow engineers to make decisions about things like product and service nomenclature, interface typography and the graphic design of icons … there’s nobody with any taste in the decision-making echelons at Nokia"

"In recent years, neuroscience has begun to solve the mystery of overeating. It turns out to have little to do with our taste buds, or even with our conscious desire for certain foods. Instead, the impulse to overeat depends on the pleasures of the stomach and intestines, which have an uncanny ability to detect the presence of calories. When we reach for that third helping of turkey, we are obeying the wishes of the gut, following a bodily desire that's difficult to resist."

"A new genetic study shows that people produce strikingly different amounts of amylase, and that the more of the enzyme people have in their mouth the faster they can liquefy starchy foods.

Scientists think this finding could help explain why people experience foods as creamy or slimy, sticky or watery, and that this perception could affect our preference for foods. For the numerous foods that contain starch, including pudding, sauces and even maple syrup, what can feel just right to some people is experienced as too runny or not melting enough for others because they produce different amounts of the enzyme."

"When you’re a kid, the fact that different people like different music is novel. Not the bare fact of it (duh) but the sheer scope of difference. I’d bet that a lot of kids reach the age of eight or so stubbornly believing that some music is objectively good (the Beach Boys) and some music objectively unlikeable (whatever Tipper Gore advocates) and some music aspirationally palatable (whatever older brother likes).

"smell & taste evolved to evoke strong emotions because they were critical to finding food & mates & avoiding poisons & predators. When we taste a food, brain searches its memory to find pattern from past experience that flavor belongs to. Then it uses that pattern to create perception of flavor, including evaluation of its desirability.

"I think the reasons these more casual recommendation and discovery methods work better for me are 3-fold: 1. They allow me to employ my fuzzy, intuitive perception of peoples’ broader personality and taste to determine how likely I am to like the things they like (I thought the person on Brightkite looked cool, so I trusted her taste; I think my Last.fm friends are cool, so I trust that new stuff I see them playing will be interesting to me). 2. They aren’t explicitly recommendation systems, but rather allow people to implicitly recommend things just by going about their normal business (someone likes a web page so they post it to Delicious to remember it later, the hipsters at Frankies like Gene Clark so they play his music while they work and I hear it incidentally). I think people are more likely to participate in this kind of system than one where they are expected to formally recommend things. 3. They don’t require me to narrow what I’m looking for by overly specific criteria"

"These two things — the accidental conferral of privilege upon the things that you just happen to privilege, and the endless eye-rolling of educated middle-class kids against other educated middle-class kids as too bourgeois and unresponsive to others — they strike me as going together, really. I wish I could say something more profitable about it than just pointing out a few gaps in the logic, but I suppose that’d run even longer than this post. For the time being, I’d like to be clear that I’m not sure how much I’m disagreeing with anything said here, or really “calling out” Sady or bmichael on anything — just noting, just observing."

"musical taste is not just about music, & that this is a good thing. This has always struck me as one of the things that’s interesting about pop music, especially when you think about it in a sort of teenaged sense — the way our tastes & affiliations are informed by, or even trying to express, things about us. Where we fit in. Whose side we’re on. Where we stand on issues of style & culture & the politics of just being a person who likes things. When it comes to adults & music critics, though, this tendency can get out of hand; it can abstract itself & spin off to a level where we are only just barely using the mere pretense of music to air grievances about other things entirely....sometimes it can be way easier to start complaining about how everyone else around is boring & predictably middle-class and blinkered and insular than it is to admit that on some level you are choosing this environment, & that there are reasons you choose it instead of another one."

"Every time you crack open a soda and enjoy a bubbly concoction, you can thank your tongue's sour-sensing cells for helping you get the full experience of a carbonated beverage.

"Companies blend the teas they buy at auction according to elaborate recipes. Indian teas provide heft, Sri Lankan teas bring flavor, & African teas bring color and strength. But the only way to know that is by tasting manufactured tea in its purest grades — and that means high-volume slurping. Muchura's taste buds are highly refined. In his tasting room is a line of no fewer than 75 cups of different teas in different grades. Muchura, dressed in a white chef's apron over understated blue trousers and a beautifully laundered Oxford shirt, has the look of Old Money, but he's kicking around the biggest spittoon you ever saw. "The concept of tasting is you're breathing it in, so you smell it through the mouth by sucking it in," he says. "Then you swirl it around your mouth and then you spit it out. But that exercise is not very attractive." Aside from the taste, Muchura also takes note of what the tea looks like in a white cup: an orange hue is good, but a greenish one is not."

"As scientists, we know that the most effective way to get reliable information is to design a method of systematic measurement. When systematic measurements are combined with interesting comparisons we have a scientific experiment.

"At flavor-tripping parties, guests find that miracle fruit makes everything sweet." see also: http://www.miraclefruitman.com/

"lesson of experiment is that our experience is end result of elaborate interpretive process, in which brain parses sensations based on expectations. If we think wine is red, or that certain brand is better, we will interpret senses to preserve that beli

"Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way—by drawing things we can see. And other stories about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world redrawn by the five senses."

"It makes me wonder about the sensory deprivation of our students when so much of their learning comes from interacting with a screen...It makes me wonder if instead of a curriculum of questions we need a curriculum of smells and tastes."

discusses media authorship, consumer generated content

"They aren’t destroying local flavor—they’re providing variety and comfort"

""It's because of a certain ingredient in toothpaste called sodium laurel sulfate. It actually blocks sweet sensors. All the other taste bud cells in your mouth are firing away nicely, but the receptors which pick up the sweet sensors are not working anym

"It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you're impressed with. One trick is to ignore presentation. Whenever I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how much would I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale