Nutrient sensors

In the years to come, we will need to do everything we can to help preserve the enjoyment in food and drink of the growing elderly population suffering from a loss of their gustatory and olfactory perception, two senses which are critical to flavour perception, but for which there are no prosthesis (akin to hearing aids and glasses used to compensate for auditory and visual loss). There is also hope that our growing cognitive neuroscience understanding of multisensory flavour perception may help the food companies to deliver healthier foods to the marketplace, that taste just like they always did, but which contain less of the unhealthy ingredients (such as sugar, salt, fat and carbonic acid). One development that would likely help further our understanding would be to develop a predictive mathematical account of the relative contribution of each of the senses to multisensory flavour perception in terms of Bayesian decision theory. Eating and drinking are among life’s most enjoyable experiences. It is about time that cognitive neuroscientists took the study of multisensory flavour perception more seriously.