Early last week, we visited a fromagerie as a class. Cheese shops can be seen all around Paris, but I had never been in one until this class visit. I had always thought of myself as a big fan of cheese for most of my life. Whenever I need a snack, I always eat swiss cheese and crackers or slices of cheddar. However, I had never tried any other types of cheese besides american, feta, cheddar, and swiss. I mistakenly assumed that this meant I would like most other types of cheese as well. When we got to the fromagerie, we went under the store into an area where they had different cheese samples ready for us to try.
Before we tasted any types of cheese, we did an exercise where we plugged our noses and ate a type of seed. At first there was no taste associated with the seeds, but once we unplugged our noses I experienced a really strong taste. It was hard to believe that so much of the taste was connected to my sense of smell! I knew that the two senses were somewhat connected before this because whenever there was food that I was reluctant to eat, people would tell me to plug my nose and eat it. However, I was still surprised at the extent to which they were connected.
Figure 2 (https://www.neuroscientificallychallenged.com/blog/know-your-brain-orbitofrontal-cortex). The orbitofrontal cortex highlighted in green.
I wanted to look further into why senses of taste and smell were so tied together, leading me to find a study called “Taste-olfactory convergence, and the representation of the pleasantness of flavor, in the human brain.” Researchers used fMRI to look at which brain areas responded to taste individually, smell individually, and areas that responded to both. They also wanted to identify areas that responded to both taste and smell in a nonlinear way, meaning that the stimuli were interacting with each other. The study found that taste and olfaction inputs converge in the caudal orbitofrontal cortex, the amygdala, the ventral forebrain, and the anterior cingulate cortex. They found that the left anterior orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) showed greater activation for olfactory and taste stimuli than the activation produced by either sense by itself. This finding fits in with the previously known roles of the orbitofrontal cortex in primates as a site of multimodal integration and encoding of combinations of stimuli. Results also showed that pleasant smells activated an anterior part of the OFC while aversive smells activated a more posterior region (De Araujo et al., 2003).
De Araujo, I., Rolls, E., Kringelbach, M., McGlone, F., & Phillips, N. (2003). Taste-olfactory convergence, and the representation of the pleasantness of flavour, in the human brain. European Journal of Neuroscience : EJN., 18(7), 2059-2068.