When you are afraid, you start going into fight or flight mode. Your body starts prioritising what is needed for immediate survival - screw routine body functions, if you don't make it past the next few moments there won't be a routine to return to. You stop digesting food. Cell repair slows or stops. You stop producing saliva, which is why your mouth goes dry when you're nervous just before making a speech or going into a difficult conversation. Your heart rate and breathing increase to ensure better blood flow. A cocktail of hormones like epinephrine and oxytocin are cued up and produced, which amplifies your body's ability to act (and remarkably, in the case of oxytocin, reminds you to seek help).
Don't be mistaken about what happens when you feel fear. Your body is readying itself to help you face what you fear in the way it knows how.
What causes us to feel fear?
1) Fear occurs to us unconsciously. Do you pause to think, hey, very angry looking snake! Maybe I should be scared. Of course not, it would be too late! Fear becomes much clearer when we examine what happens inside your brain. When you are afraid, the fear/anger/aggression/anxiety centre of your brain - the amygdalas (get used to this name, it's gonna keep popping up) lights up. And we've covered all the changes that happen in your body: your blood pressure, your hormones, your heart-rate. But remember how amygdala is like a train interchange with direct routes to different parts of your brain? There is a direct neural link between our amygdala and your pre-frontal cortex, the rational thinking part of your brain. And if we look closely enough or we think things through, sometimes we realise, argh! it's not an angry snake, it's just a prank toy that your annoying friend had thrown at you. Or if you've handled angry snakes enough times, your amygdala does not light as much. Your blood pressure and your heart rate do not increase as much, you realise what you need to do is to stay calm and slowly back away.
Finally, notice how fear, anger, aggression, and anxiety are processed by the same part of the brain, the amygdala. This is no coincidence. These 4 emotions are closely tied to one another; aggression maybe triggered because one is nervous, angry, or fearful. Being fearful may cause one to react angrily, as a self-defense mechanism. Fear, like all our emotions, happens to us. Mostly, we can't control how it originates. But we can control how it develops by understanding what exactly is causing fear and by choosing the response that dispels it
2) We fear what we are unconfident or uncertain about. Think back on your ancestors doing something they weren't confident or certain off - hunting a massive animal without a weapon, or eating a berry they've never seen before. Doing so would mean a very high chance of seriously harming themselves. Today, after many cycles of evolution, we have been wired based on these experiences.
Think about it. Are you ever fearful of something you've done before, and are good? Brushing your teeth, putting on your clothes, indulging in your favourite hobby (whatever it is)? Of course not. You know you can perform these functions easily. You are confident.
But many of us would have felt fearful and anxious the first time we ventured into something new: using a pair of chopsticks, riding a bicycle, swimming, going on a first date. We were uncertain about these functions, and we were not confident about performing them. However, once we have demonstrated to ourselves that we are able to perform these tasks, we are no longer afraid. The same applies to more challenging tasks. Some of us struggle with: public speaking, starting a business, having a very difficult conversation with the CEO... You are uncertain and unconfident if you can succeed. But once you have proven to yourself you are able to do it, even for the more challenging tasks, you are no longer afraid. People might start off feeling scared about public speaking, but after speech 3797, you're pro The catch, of course, is that sometimes, we are too scared to start.
Even if we were certain of something OR confident about something, many of us will still feel some amount of fear. We might be theoretically certain how we should use a pair of chopsticks, but if we have never succeeded in using them properly, we remain unconfident and will still feel nervous if we had to use them, especially when others are observing. You might also be confident about
3) we fear what is painful. Boxer. climbing 100 flights of stairs or doing 100 burpees. But pain is not just physical but mental. Failure is painful. Being judged is painful.
This is why you procrastinate. You either fear what you have to do bevause you don't know how to do it (you don't fear brushing your teeth for example), or you fear doing something becaue you know it will be effortful
4) we fear what we cannot control
Learn more about your amygdala, the amygdala hijack, the thalamus, the pre-frontal cortex, and how your brain works here.
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Summary:
- Fear and anxiety (and anger + aggression) are always
But the perfect meal isn’t just about the senses. ‘It is also about memories and emotions,’ says Spence. ‘Increasingly the perfect meal is about the theatricalization: the imagination and storytelling are all brought to bear to turn the food into something memorable.’
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What about cutlery? The Fat Duck, for example, is known for its incredibly heavy cutlery – is this part of the perfect meal? Does the weight in your hand make things taste better? Spence mentions and experiment that looked at this, with 160 diners in the Sheraton Grand in Edinburgh. Half use the regular heavy cutlery, the other half use lighter cutlery, and those using the heavier are willing to pay £1.50–£2 a plate more for the same food.
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He gives the example of Denis Martin in the Valais, whose restaurant has 2 Michelin stars. It’s based in the middle of a knitting museum. Martin can see when people walk through the door that they aren’t going to enjoy his modern Swiss cuisine fully: they are uptight, suited Swiss businessmen dining on an expenses account. How does he solve this? People are told to arrive at 7 pm and there’s nothing on the tablecloth except for a toy Swiss cow. Nothing happens until someone picks the cow up and it moos, and before long the restaurant is filled with the sounds of laughter and mooing cows. This breaks the atmosphere: a psychological palate cleanser, preparing people for the meal to come.
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Then there’s ‘digital seasoning’. This began with Heston Blumenthal’s Sound of the Sea dish (recipe here - I won’t be trying it at home), where diners are given a conch with an ipod shuffle in it, and listen on headphones to a marine soundtrack that works to enhance the flavour of the dish. A residence at the House of Wolf in Islington took this idea more midmarket, with theme music playing with each dish across the whole restaurant. And this was taken further mass market by British Airways: customers on long haul can dial in on headset to music that matches the taste of their food.
Spence notes that some high profile new restaurants have been multisensory. There’s Ultraviolet in Shanghai, a 10 seater restaurant based in a secret location (you get taken there). It’s a high-tech experiential dining room, with each course enhanced by a taste-tailored atmosphere. For example, it serves fish and chips with sounds of the sea, projections of the Union flag on the table, and a device squirting out marine smells: it’s a true multisensory experience.
There’s Sublimotion in Ibiza, which at £1200 a head is thought to be the world’s most expensive restaurant. ‘At this sort of price it cannot just be about the food and taste and flavours,’ says Spence. ‘It has to be about the whole experience.’ And Sublimotion certainly delivers an experience.
One of the strongest influence on flavour is visual. ‘We are led by our eyes,’ says Spence. He refers to a dish (again, from Heston) that’s a scoop of pink/red food that looks like strawberry ice cream. It’s actually a crab bisque and Heston thought it tasted wonderful, but people found it over-seasoned and too salty. The eyes say ‘sweet’ and the palate says ‘savoury’, and the result is that given this expectation, it ends up tasting too salty. ‘The first experience of this dish has to be right and involve the right name,’ says Spence. ‘If you call this dish fugue 386 it’s enough to suspend expectations and you come at it with a fresh palate and it will taste seasoned just right – the chef has to get into the mind of the diner and to lead their expectations.’
How food looks matters now more than ever, in the age of smartphones and sharing pictures of our dishes on social media. Back in the 1960s French chefs didn’t care how things looked: food was about the taste, and it was served on the plate as it might be at home. Then came nouvelle cuisine and things began to change. ‘In the 21st Century the perfect meal should look just so,’ says Spence.
The way a plate looks is a key element in our enjoyment, but does it make a difference with taste? Yes is the answer. This has been studied. Many chefs these days do asymmetric plating , but in studies people are willing to pay less and enjoy the food less than if the food is plated in a more symmetrical manner.
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The colour of the plate matters. In one experiment, Ferran Adria took one of his desserts and served it to half on a white plate and half on a black one. It tasted 10% sweeter and 15% more flavourful on the white plate. And in a hospital setting, patients ready for procedure are often given a red tray. But ‘red’ says ‘don’t eat me’: put anything on a red plate or red tray, and people will eat less.
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Why do we consume 35 percent more food when eating with one other person, and 75 percent more when dining with three? How do we explain the fact that people who like strong coffee drink more of it under bright lighting? And why does green ketchup just not work?
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The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips," published in the Journal of Sensory Studies in 2004. The experiment was the first to successfully show that food could taste different depending on changes in sound. In the experiment, Spence demonstrated that the pitch and volume of the noise made when biting into Pringles chips affected people's perception of how fresh they were. Louder, higher-pitched crunch noises were rated by eaters to be 15% fresher on average than softer, lower-pitched crunch noises. [5]
Since then, his research has established that the sight, touch and sound of food can have large effects on its perceived taste. Other findings include that strawberry mousse is perceived as 10% sweeter when eaten from a white container over a black one, that coffee drunk from white mugs tastes almost two times more intense but only two-thirds as sweet as coffee drunk from a black mug, and that eaters perceive yogurt to be roughly 25% more filling when its plastic container weighs two and a half ounces more.
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Well, have you ever eaten Chilean sea bass?* It is the product of a particular sort of alchemy, ‘The Alchemy of Semantics’. The $20 slice of fish that graces plates in high-end restaurants under the name ‘Chilean sea bass’ actually comes from a fish that for many years was known as the Patagonian toothfish. No one is going to pay $20 for a plate of Patagonian toothfish – call it Chilean sea bass, however, and the rules change. An American fish wholesaler called Lee Lentz had the idea, even though, strictly speaking, most of the catch doesn’t come from Chile and the toothfish isn’t even related to the bass
More recently, a similar thing happened to pilchards. Caught off the Cornish coast before being salted and shipped all over Europe, they had been a delicacy for centuries, until the advent of domestic refrigeration and freezing caused the appetite for salted fish – at least outside of Portugal – fall away. ‘The market was dying fast as the little shops that sold them closed down,’ says Nick Howell of the Pilchard Works fish suppliers in Newlyn. ‘I realised I needed to do something about it.’ He discovered that what the Cornish often called the pilchard was related to the fish that was served, with lemon and olive oil, to British tourists in the Mediterranean as a fashionable sardine.* So he changed the name from the pilchard, a name redolent of ration food,* to the ‘Cornish sardine’. Next, a supermarket buyer who called to ask for French sardines was deftly switched to buying ‘pilchards from Cornwall’. A few years ago Nick successfully petitioned the EU to award Cornish sardines Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status, and the result was extraordinary: the Daily Telegraph reported in 2012 that sales of fresh sardines at Tesco had rocketed by 180 per cent in the past year, an increase that was partly explained by a huge increase in the sales of ‘Cornish sardines’. This rebranding exercise had reinvigorated the entire Cornish fishing industry.
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Merely adding a geographical or topographical adjective to food – whether on a menu in a restaurant or on packaging in a supermarket – allows
you to charge more for it and means you will sell more. According to research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, descriptive menu labels raised sales by 27 per cent in restaurants, compared to food items without descriptors.
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A gelateria can charge more than an ice-cream parlour. adding artisinal into the description makes it feel artisinal.
He discovered that what the Cornish often called the pilchard was related to the fish that was served, with lemon and olive oil, to British tourists in the Mediterranean as a fashionable sardine.* So he changed the name from the pilchard, a name redolent of ration food,* to the ‘Cornish sardine’. Next, a supermarket buyer who called to ask for French sardines was deftly switched to buying ‘pilchards from Cornwall’. A few years ago Nick successfully petitioned the EU to award Cornish sardines Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status, and the result was extraordinary: the Daily Telegraph reported in 2012 that sales of fresh sardines at Tesco had rocketed by 180 per cent in the past year, an increase that was partly explained by a huge increase in the sales of ‘Cornish sardines’. This rebranding exercise had reinvigorated the entire Cornish fishing industry.
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If French music is played while you’re wine-shopping, you’re likelier to buy French wine. – this is all about priming. Study in Nature. Only 1 in 44 people recognized that the music influenced the choice. 86% of them thought it didn't affect them (but it did.)
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However, a fetish for expensive wines seems to me entirely about self-placebbing or status seeking, and little to do with enjoyment – after all, is a great wine really all that much nicer than a good one?*
The Netflix documentary Sour Grapes is a fascinating insight into this world. A crooked, though brilliant, Indonesian wine connoisseur called Rudy Kurniawan was able to replicate great burgundies by mixing cheaper wines together, before faking the corks and the labels. He was rumbled only when he attempted to fake wines from vintages that did not exist. I am told that it is possible to detect a forged Kurniawan wine by analysing the labels, but not by tasting the wine.