Explorations of Perception: Taste.

Weightlessness blocks retronasal smell and congests the sinuses. The result: every flavor becomes flat. Yet what you call taste is the outcome of a complex neurochemical interplay between smell, touch, and memory, a process so sophisticated it feels like science fiction.

Here’s the intergalactic route it takes:

• First landing on the tongue: your taste buds (you have about 10,000) detect five main signals: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami.

• Simultaneous translation: these taste buds convert food molecules into chemical signals.

• Electric impulse: those chemical signals turn into electrical ones and travel along the gustatory nerves straight to the brain.

• Brain party: in the gustatory cortex, the flavor control center, the signal is decoded and intertwined with memory, emotion, and context.

• Chemical-emotional reaction: if the taste is pleasant, the brain releases dopamine, the molecule of pleasure.

That’s why sometimes a single bite can bring tears to your eyes, as if you’d just witnessed your first sunset on Saturn.

In short, taste is a biochemical lightning bolt, a meeting between matter and memory.

And luckily, you live on Earth, the planet where coffee can tell stories of peach, citrus, and cacao.