The art of Flavor

The rule of fives.

Quick overview: 

We have five senses: the sensations of taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight.

Taste is our ability to perceive food, minerals, and poisons, using our taste buds, or gustatory calyculi, which are concentrated on our tongue. The five basic tastes are sweet, salty, sour, umami, and bitter. 


Now how does flavor fit into the perception of our senses?

Flavor depends on a combination of factors including visual appearance, texture, temperature, taste, and aroma. The olfactory is quite important for intensity of a flavor.  

So flavor is a multi-sensory dependent experience. 


Based on past experiences, our brains associates certain flavors with the visual stimulation of shapes, color...

How many other experiences in life, are affected by all our senses. This is exactly why eating can be such a pleasurable , even all consuming experience.

Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed

The Art of Science, in Life

Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, shared this observation, in an early medical text, Aphorismi.

Latin Translation:	English Translation:
Vita brevis, ars longa, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.	Life is short, and art long, opportunity fleeting, experience perilous, and decision difficult.

Such concise excerpts share subjective truths or observations. Perhaps the meaning can be interpreted as developing a meaningful skill is a long arduous journey, and yet there is limited time to practice and pursue this expertise.

There is a very prevalent relationship between art and science that may not always seem intuitive. But according to the New Oxford American Dctionary, science is the systematical study of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. And art, well it is the expression of human skill and imagination. But "art" in the fore mentioned aphorism, originally comes from the Latin: ars, translated from Greek: τέχνη (techne), meaning technique or skill.

So a well-formed experiment can most certainly be elegant and artful. But according to the rudiments of texts, art is skill. And thus art is a necessary element of scientific practice.   Especially necessary in scientific endeavors and acquired through practice.

Let's finish with the modified aphorism:
Life remains ephemeral, and art eternal, so too is science.