You mean I can use this to challenge my brain and thus lessen my chances of getting dementia? Your doctor will never approve.
The negative here:
Extra glass of wine a day 'will shorten your life by 30 minutes'
Wine tasting can work the brain more than math, according to neuroscience
By Sarah DiGiulio
If
you’re a wine connoisseur or enjoy a good Cabernet, you likely don’t
need another reason to put “wine tasting” on a list of activities you
like. But science has one for you: it can stimulate the brain more than a
lot of other activities (from listening to a Beethoven concerto to
solving a complex trigonometry problem).
Don’t go thinking that’s a license to start guzzling glass
after glass of Rosé with reckless abandon, however. A key part of the
activity is the “concentrated discrimination of the taste of wine,”
explains Gordon M. Shepherd, PhD, DPhil, Professor of Neuroscience at
Yale School of Medicine, who wrote the book on this topic,
"Neuroenology". That means the brain ramps it up when you’re actively
engaged in tasting your libation, but probably not so much if you’re
thoughtlessly gulping. (And that’s whether you’re a sommelier or a novice sipper.)
“It
involves multiple sensory and motor systems, as well as central
conceptual systems for cognition and memory — and systems for emotion
and pleasure,” Shepherd says. So the brain becomes more engaged in wine
tasting than it would, for example, be when it comes to solving a math
problem or listening to music, which involve fewer body systems working together.
A
key point (and yes, a somewhat abstract one to wrap your head around)
is that the flavors we perceive aren't in the food or drink itself, but
rather something that the brain creates.
The brain creates all of what we see and feel
The brain actually creates all of our sensory world, Shepherd says. Color, for example, does not exist in the objects we see.
Whether something appears purple or orange to us is instead a result of
the way light hits that object and those different wave lengths of
light stimulate the circuits of our brain (which we’ve identified as
different colors). Similarly, we feel pain because of the neural processing that happens in the brain in response to a stimulus that something is wrong with another part of our body (such as a brick falling on our foot).
“In
the same way, molecules in food and wine have no flavor in themselves,”
he says. “Our sensory systems create our perceptions of flavor.”
But
what’s different about taste compared to our other senses is that so
many body systems and sensory processes are involved, as Shepherd
explains in a 2015 review article published in the journal Flavour.
First
the senses: Our sense of smell (both the odor stimuli we get from
sniffing in as well as from breathing out) are involved. And our sense
of sight is involved, perceiving what the food or drink looks like. And
there’s the sense of touch (or the texture of food) we feel in our mouth
and our tongue. Additionally, different muscle and motor systems are
involved in the physical process of tasting (the tongue, jaw, cheek,
neck and more).
Then
there are the brain systems involved (the central behavioral systems):
Memory systems are engaged in recognizing flavors you’ve experienced
before. You may or may not have an emotional response to a wine.
Hormonal systems may be triggered to deliver a dopamine (pleasure)
response. The brain regions that control motivation are activated to
determine whether or not you’ll keep drinking. The pleasure network in
the brain makes the final decision on our rating of the wine. And the
part of the brain that controls language and communication is activated
if you’re telling others about what you just tasted.
Technically
wine is a food. So does the same thing happen in your brain when you’re
tasting, let’s say, a piece of chocolate cake or a type of olive oil
with “concentrated discrimination”?
In principle, yes,
Shepherd says. But wine is composed almost wholly from molecules that
give it its distinct taste, versus other foods composed of molecules
that provide nutrition, too. So, according to Shepherd: “Wine drinkers
therefore can concentrate exclusively on perceptual details about
flavor.”
Aug. 24, 201801:48Taste depends on a lot more than the chemical composition of wine
Charles
Spence, PhD, Professor of Experimental Psychology at University of
Oxford, studies how the human mind processes information from the
environment around us. Work from his lab suggests that there are a lot
of factors besides the chemical composition of a wine affect what we
taste, and therefore the brain is busy when we’re (thoughtfully) tasting
it.
“A lot of pleasure resides in the expectations we
have that can come from the weight of the bottle, the type of closure
and the music playing in the background,” he says. “All these other
factors [can] typically elevate the experience.”
A 2017
study from him and his colleagues suggest that even for wine writers,
whether the taster hears a cork being popped or a screw-cap bottle being
unscrewed can affect their ratings
— likely because each sound sets off different expectations, which do
affect taste, according to the paper. The study included 140 individuals
(all with varying levels of wine expertise), and is still a preliminary
investigation of the question.
Other data found how heavy a wine bottle is and the music a taster is listening to can change the words we use to describe it.
Together
the research says it’s the total multisensory experience that explains
why tasting wine engages so much of the brain, Spence says — “whereas a
concert only engages one sense: hearing.”
If you’re
tasting a wine and trying to distinguish different notes and distinctive
aromas, he adds — “and trying to fit that with prior wines we have
tasted, there is a lot going on.”
The caveat, however, is
there’s a danger in suggesting that all flavor happens in the brain, as
the chemical composition of what you’re drinking must be relevant, too.
(No matter what music is playing and how fancy a bottle a liquid comes
out of, you likely won’t mix up the tastes of wine and orange juice, for
example.)
“But the perception and enjoyment we
experience is clearly a construct of the mind that engages the senses
and links to our memories,” Spence explains.
Does that mean that wine tasting is good for my brain?
This
is where the discussion gets tricky. Wine tasting as an activity may
engage the brain more than other activities. (And that activation is how
we learn things and sharpen our cognitive skills, Shepherd says.)
But
that doesn’t mean that the alcohol you’re putting in your body isn’t
causing other problems. A large, global analysis published in August of
more than 700 studies that looked at alcohol consumption and disease burden found that it actually may be that any amount of drinking heightens disease risk.
“It’s
hard to argue against the neuroscience [Shepherd] presents,” says David
A. Merrill, MD, PhD, a clinical research scientist and psychiatrist at
the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human
Behavior
at University of California-Los Angeles. “It is entertaining to think
of how many neural systems are activated from a process that looks so
simple on the surface.”
But there’s also pretty
convincing evidence that alcohol consumption can do it’s share of
damage, too. For any patients with early-stage memory loss, depression,
anxiety, insomnia and fall risk, drinking alcohol can worsen these
problems. And there’s the concerning findings in that new study on the
global disease burden of alcohol, he says.
The bottom line, he says: “Wine is a double-edged sword.”
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