A Thunk is a beguilingly simple-looking question about everyday things that stops you in your tracks and helps you start to look at the world in a whole new light. © Ian Gilbert.
Thunk 22:
Can you taste colour?
Nullius in Verba
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18 comments:
I think that depends on how open you keep your mind to, well, "fanciful" ideas I suppose. Maybe you relate certain colors with certain tastes that seem to stick in your memory. I know I always imagine lemon flavored Nerds when I see bright yellow :>
I don't know, maybe it depends on how much of a food connoisseur you are? Whether you retain um... the memory of flavors on your tastebuds, how it felt while eating, the color, how open you tend to be with how color can effect you to begin with. Does artistic talent have anything to do with it? A penchant for food-tasting? An eye - or maybe a tongue ohgodbadjoke - for color?
Or am I just confusing myself? >:
I definitely associate color with taste so either I'm deranged or it's not something that's often discussed. Aaaand that's why we have these thunks, I guess.
Hmm.. Yeah I guess, in a way you have this idea of what certain colours are SUPPOSED to taste like! So it's really not the colour that you're tasting but the object or food that you relate it with. Like when I see red I can taste strawberries and when I see green, I can taste kiwi! :P
But I still consider that tasting the colour! :)
Um...I think we associate a colour with a flavour but it's not really the colour we taste but the flavour that has been associated with it...like red with strawberry and orange with oranges.
Aisha Bashir.
10g2
No you cannot eat colour, you can only see colour with your eyes but can only taste with your mouth, taste is also invisible.
I agree with that to an extent..
Yes sure, you're able to relate a lot of colors to different kinds of food BUT you can't LITERALLY taste the colous (obviously :P)
it's all psychological.
i mean, yeah, green coloured biryani is quite unappetizing. However, a blindfold later, it tastes just as good.
I don't know really, we're just so used to classifying things according to their physical characteristics...
It's not just fruit and foods that inform our association of taste with colour, it's also products like shampoos, soaps, detergents, cosmetic creams...
Peach-coloured shampoos almost invariably have a peach fragrance, lavender-coloured soaps have a lavender fragrance.
But as others above have pointed out, we tend to confuse colour with taste. The taste is inherent in the food. But that begs the question, would we find a turquoise-coloured burger appetising? - or blue-coloured chicken?
One word for those of you who are curious about whether you can actually taste colour: "Synaesthesia." Look it up. It's fascinating.
Well it depends, I mean.. It's all in your head. Like if you see rainbow colored sprinkles your going to think that its got a sweet taste but if you see green vegetables then most would just go bleh. But then again I don't think licking a red colored crayon would taste very nice.
Well exactly; all those other products are made in such a way that people would generally find it appealing, with the colour and smell going together. If you saw an orange coloured shower gel, you'd expect it to have a citrus-y tinge to it. If it turned out to smell like, let's say, strawberries, it just wouldn't go together.
People have this habit of associating colour with different tastes, and again, it's become a universal consensus, so going against the different colour/smell combinations would just put people off as it's not "normal".
In the case of people with synaesthesia, they have the rare neurological habit of experiencing colours when they hear or read words, whilst others may experience tastes, smells, shapes or touches in almost any combination. In other words, it's when two or more senses are connected. I read a lot of articles, and this is what one person with synaesthesia said:
"I see flavours and fragrances in colours and shapes. Again, it's not very strong due to learned/logical associations. A new medicine may taste burgundy and look like a certain kind of blob/squiggle, whereas I simply associate the taste of an orange with the colour orange and see lavender soap as smelling purple."
In conclusion, we may not be able to physically taste a colour, but a lot goes on in our brain that makes us think we do. Even all us humans without synaesthesia associate different tastes with colours, which doesn't mean we actually taste it, but it happens psychologically, in our head.
Nope, I'm not going to go and confuse myself here but I'm going to go in simply here: If you taste something with your eyes closed (Forget about what it is or could be) could you tell what colour it was? Simple answer for me is No.
Therefore, for me taste and colour are 2 different senses. And Mr. Roberts' term of 'Synaesthesia' in my opinion doesn't apply to taste and sight (colour).
Maybe to... Touch and sight? I know for a fact that when I even glance at a blackboard I get shivers down my spine.
Duwane
There are some people who've used hallucinogens like LSD and have literally tasted colours. This is obviously not normal and is an effect of the drug - but synaesthesia is the apt word to describe what they experience.
Watch the TED clip http://winchesterenglish.blogspot.com/2009/09/phantoms-in-brain.html where he talks about tasting colour. [Unless I'm getting confused with his book "The Emperor's New Mind."]
Well, technically, no. We have related different moods to different colours so we have yet to relate taste.
Well firstly, I find that mans accent to be remarkable. That intelligent american voice with this hint of South Indian roots somewhere in there. Quite intruiging to listen to.
I skipped ahead to the synaesthesia part, and he raised some good points. And towards the end he really captivated me, and I would have to say his theory sounds about right. But what the problem precisely is, is that only very people have the very strong ability to relate such things (Taste and Colour).
Therefore... When a few thousand of the worlds billions of people say that they relate a certain colour to a taste... We can only say they are delusional.
^Duwane, interestin point. However, the number of people who believe a proposition no more makes the proposition true any more than the number of people who fall sick makes the disease good.
2500 years ago almost all Greeks believed that Zeus and Apollo and Hercules were real and that the earth was flat.
So, just because a minority of people say they can taste colour/sound does that make them delusional? Maybe it's us the majority who are delusional (like the majority of the ancient Greeks). Maybe it is we who have an impoverished mind :)
I kindda feel that yes you can.. the way you relate emotions to colours, you can relate good tastes to bright colours and bad tastes to dull colours! :)
Hmm, well, I suppose you can say that one can metaphorically, as in relating certains tastes to certain colors like Neiha said. I think we as humans just natually associate colors with foods which we convert to tastes, and scents. It's just one of our quirks that just comes naturally. :)
This just reminded me of these jelly beans they used to make and theyd have them taste like the most nasty thing such as; vomit, earwax, and booger. But when you ate them and as nasty as they were, it was easy to tell which was which. Maybe our senses have some form of connection to eachother.
Also Sir, I'm very sorry about the late replies, this is definatily not how I wanted to end the year on academic terms :S
I'm still trying to come up with an answer for this. :(
SOrry for the uber lateness
You can’t particularly taste colour as such, but you can certainly relate certain colours with taste. The “taste” we process when we see a colour or hear about a colour occurs as we have a collection so to say of food with a colour and its particular taste it holds.
Although there is a disorder condition that a minority of people have like Mr. Roberts mentioned in class called Synesthesia. These people can actually taste colour if they hear, see or touch a certain colour, they can also relate sounds to the colours.
Nope, We don’t actually taste colours we just associate each colour with a flavour.
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