Wine Tasting Takes Brains
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| Wine may stimulate the bit of buffs' brains involved in language and recognition. | |
In connoisseurs, a quick slurp seems to trigger a cerebral response that is absent in casual drinkers. It may help them to process and describe their tipple.
The burst of activity is in the mid frontal cortex, a brain area involved in language and recognition, find Gisela Hagberg and her colleagues at the Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome, Italy.
The team monitored the brains of seven wine tasters and seven lucky volunteers as they sampled three fine Italian wines. All 14 had strong activityin the parts of the brain that respond to pleasure and taste.
Professional tasters' unusual patterns suggest that "they are trying to understand what they're drinking," says Hagberg, who presented the results at the Italian Wine Academy's 37th meeting in Sienna last week. "Training does not just educate your palate, it also affects how your brain responds to the taste of wine."
"This is fantastic," says Andrea Sturniolo, one of the sommeliers who participated in the study. He feels that it vindicates the skill of "breaking down the many tastes of a wine".
But many of the buffs found the research unsettling. They had to lie inside a brain scanner and drink the wine through a straw. "They couldn't see the wine. They didn't know what they were drinking. They couldn't swirl it around inside their mouth," says Hagberg. "They didn't appreciate the process at all."
"This is an interesting but preliminary study," cautions Edmund Rolls, who studies smell and taste at the University of Oxford, UK. Some of these brain structures are very close together, so it may be difficult to tell exactly which region is being affected.
Hagberg agrees that the study is just a starting point, saying that her team plans to use their alcoholic bait to lure more subjects for a bigger trial.
By Helen R. Pilcher – Originally published on Nature News Service © Macmillan Magazines Ltd. 2003 |
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