by
David G. Wittels
3
Part
1
- Part 2
Few people get as much fun out of their
work as
experimental psychologists do, which is one reason why Dr. Samuel
Renshaw -- a brilliant pioneer in this unsung field -- looks a decade
less than his fifty-five years and darts between classrooms and
laboratories at a pace which could kill younger men. In addition to the
fascination of exploring the mysteries of what makes people tick, there
is the lure of the unexpected. There is no telling where an experiment
may lead.
One day eighteen years ago Renshaw got to
wondering exactly where the distinction lay, in human sensation,
between hot and cold. He began by experimenting with boiled water --
and wound up as an authority on the sense of taste. Today a large
whiskey company pays him a retainer to advise it on how to control the
taste of its products, and underwrites the expenses of a laboratory at
Ohio State University where some of the most important basic research
ever done on the phenomenon of taste is going on.
One of
the things Renshaw has demonstrated there is that, just as with
eyesight and memory, the sense of taste can be sharpened tremendously.
For instance, if a man finds he needs three teaspoonfuls of sugar to
sweeten coffee to his taste, he can train himself to get the same
effect from one teaspoonful or less. This does not involve self-denial
or self-hypnotism, but the development of a keener sense of taste.
Since Renshaw's main work has been on vision, with detours into how
memory works, this delving into taste and whisky may seem as if he
flitted very far afield. But it is neither erratic nor paradoxical.
Most modern psychologists believe in what some them call "unity of the
senses." They think that seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and the
so-called sense of touch are merely different aspects of the same thing.
This abstruse concept has not been proved entirely beyond dispute, but
it has been established that all the senses are so interdependent that
real research on one demands learning a great deal about the others.
"It is practically impossible," says Renshaw, "to disassociate vision,
hearing, kinesthesis, smell, taste and the organics." It is literally
true that to some extent we hear with our eyes, see through our
memories, taste with our noses and smell with our tongues.
For instance, we hear partly with our eyes whenever we watch a
speaker's lips and gestures. This can be tested by closing the eyes
while listening to someone who mumbles or otherwise does not articulate
quite clearly. You will find yourself tempted to say, "Speak louder!"
whereas with your eyes open you could hear him quite well.
One example of seeing through memory occurs every time someone says
that an object "looks heavy." Of course, nothing ever really "looks"
heavy. The eyes have no apparatus for judging weight. To them, a
balloon and an iron ball are the same. It is memory, recalling how our
muscles felt -- kinesthetic sense -- when we hefted various objects,
which enables us to "see" that an object is probably heavy.
The greatest overlapping is between the sense of smell and the sense of
taste. These two faculties are continually engaged in a sort of
Alphonse-and-Gaston act, with each allowing the other to get credit for
its work or for work done jointly. Many flavors for which we credit the
sense of taste are reallly odors which are savored by the sense of
smell. If the sense of smell is blocked off, an apple and an onion
taste much the same. A banana is practically tasteless, and a luscious
mince pie tastes like mush. The two senses are so intertwined that, so
far, it has not been possible to separate them entirely even in
laboratory work. Some psychologists even refer to smell as "taste at a
distance."
But Renshaw wasn't thinking of this when, one
day in 1930, he began to play around with hot water. He was primarily
interested in how, through our skins, we get sensations such as
pressure, pain, heat and cold. To do such experiments on a true
scientific basis, he needed some definitions. "Hot" and "cold" are
relative terms. But at what point in human sensation did cold change to
hot?
He began by using himself as a guinea pig. He heated
water and, at every degree, put a couple of drops on the back of his
hand. But the skin there proved too erratic in its reactions for find
measurements. So he decided to try the drops on his cupped tongue. He
found a neutral zone of from six to eight degrees centigrade where his
tongue gave him no report on temperature. Actually, there were two such
"neutral zones," beginning at around twenty-one degrees and at about
forty-two degrees, depending upon whether he was working from hot to
cold or vice verse. He called those points "thresholds."
Then he began to wonder if there weren't thresholds in taste, too. He
put salt, grain by grain, into distilled water and tried the solutions
on his tongue. Then he did the same with sugar. He found the thresholds
he expected, but he also found that salt doesn't always taste salty and
that sugar doesn't always taste sweet. Some times, in very weak and
very strong solutions, and at very high and very low temperatures, salt
tasted sweet and sugar tasted bitter, salty or even sour.
At this point he began using his students as guinea pigs on which to
check and extend his findings. Repeated experiments on scores of
students verified that those phenomena were not merely personal
peculiarities of his taste. But in comparing the experiments, he
discovered another fact -- that the human tongue is an awful liar. Not
only did the reactions of different tongues differ but the same tongues
gave contradictory reports from day to day, and even from minute to
minute.
That looked like a fertile field for exploration.
Very little psychological work had been done on taste, and that phase
of it was virtually untouched. Day after day, month after month, he
made his students taste the same things over and over again, until they
grew weary and bored. Some of them even began to suspect that he was
trying to make fools of them.
One day one of his
postgraduate students, working as an assistant in the course, came to
him with a request. "Doctor Renshaw," he said, "I'm running a test on
the various flavors detectable in whisky. The youngsters around here
haven't tasted enough brands to give sophisticated reports. Would you
mind being my subject for this experiment?"
The assistant
had prepared five samples of bourbon whisky, cut to forty-five proof
with distilled water, so that it would not blast the taste buds. He put
a few drops of each on Renshaw's tongue. Renshaw got two minutes' rest
between samples, and in that time dictated reports on each. The reports
were kept as examples:
No. 1. Apple component followed by
smooth, slight sweet. Mild alcohol passes into fairly weak bitter.
Becomes smooth and slightly astringent. Aftertaste rough, slightly
salty.
No. 2. More grainy than No.1 Better flavor.
Smooth, sweet. Slight bitter comes up, passes quickly. Practically no
pucker or roughness. Aftertaste smooth and sweet.
No. 3.
Bland, slightly alcoholic. Bitter comes in weakly, builds up to intense
bitter. Absence of graininess and fruity flavor. Predominantly bitter.
Not much aftertaste.
No. 4. Smooth, sweet, slightly
astringent. Very distinct bitter comes in and persists, but eventually
disappears, leaving a slight smoothness with a touch of sour. Poor
quality. No aftertaste.
No. 5. Smooth, sweet, faint flash
of bitter comes in and disappears, followed by slight saline. A little
bit of "bite." Aftertaste smooth, slightly sweetish; pleasant, very
slight fruity or grainy component. Far better than previous samples.
As the reader has probably guess, all five samples were identical. The
same test tube and pipette were used and the temperature was held
constant throughout. The test was merely a plot by his assistants to
get even with Renshaw for making fools of them.
But
Renshaw laughed louder than anyone else, and not merely to save face.
The test proved exactly what he was trying to hammer home. The point
was that the moment he took one taste he no longer was the same person.
The first taste set certain reflexes to work so that by the time he
took the second sample his taste buds were no longer in the same
condition. The second taste caused further changes, and so on down the
line.
This experiment, plus the previous evidence of many
similar ones, set Renshaw to wondering about professional tasters. Such
experts, who in the whisky business are aptly nicknamed "Tongues," play
a highly important role in several industries. They are standard
equipment in the coffee, tea, wine, beer and whisky trades, and
sometimes are used in ice cream, chocolate and cheese factories and in
big bakeries. They do not need to pass formal examinations to qualify
as experts, but in some cases their judgment literally becomes the law.
Such is the case with tea. Under the Tea Inspection Act of March 2,
1897, the Secretary of Agriculture annually appoints a United States
Board of Tea Experts. This consists of seven men who have spent many
years in the tea business and have acquired the reputation for having
extraordinarily sensitive palates. They meet for a week every February
in New York and test samples of tea by feeling them, smelling them and,
finally, tasting them. Their judgments set the tea standards for that
year, and no shipment of tea which fails to meet those standards is
permitted to enter the country.
For the taste test the
experts sit around a circular revolving table lined with cups. The tea
is brewed right in the cups by pouring boiling water on samples
weighing the equivalent of a United States dime. The tasting is a
gusty, noisy process. The experts suck a large spoonful of each brew
rapidly and loudly into their mouths. The shlupping is done so that the
tea will slap against the palate and the back of the tongue, where the
experts believe the taste sensitivity to be greatest. The tea remains
in their mouths for only a second before, with practiced accuracy, they
eject it into large brass cuspidors. As a final step, they smack their
lips rapidly and heartily, to get the full effect of the aftertaste. In
one week they may taste more than 1000 samples.
For
coffee, the New York Coffee Exchange selects a jury of twelve drawn
from a panel of some fifty experienced men. They do not have the
official status of the tea tasters, but in actual practice their
verdict is almost as important. Their judgment, according to one
expert, is based "25 per cent on aroma, 10 per cent on appearance --
that is, whether it is clear or muddy in the cup -- and 65 per cent on
taste."
These experts, too, sit around a revolving table
bearing cups. Boiling water is poured on samples weighing the
equivalent of a United States nickel each. The experts sniff the brew,
then stir it and sniff again, and then, when it is cool enough, taste
it. At first they act a bit more refined than their brethren in tea.
Instead of shlupping noisily, they sip slowly and thoughtfully. But
finally they, too, let fly at brass spittoons. In both coffee and tea,
large firms also maintain their own experts to pass on their special
blends.
Winetasters sniff, sip and sometimes even rub a
few drops between their fingers. Like tea and coffee tasters, they make
their reports in special vocabularies which are incomprehensible to
laymen. Sometimes they wax downright poetic. One expert once explained
that "not only must the flavor be clean and not acid or musty, alive
and not flat, deep and not just superficial, but in a good wine it must
be suave and supple as the vibrations of a violin string." Despite this
ecstatic approach, winetasters do not swallow the samples, and between
sips they refresh their palates by chewing chunks of bread or cheese.
In this country the professional beer tasters are the master brewers
and their assistants in each brewery. But in England the standards are
set by publicly elected men known as "aleconners." The title goes back
to the time of William the Conqueror, and the word "conner" is from the
Middle English "cun," meaning to prove or examine. At least until
recently, the City of London regularly elected four aleconners at the
same time its voters chose the sheriffs and the chamberlain.
There was a time when these conners literally used the seat of their
pants to help them arrive at their verdicts. They wore leather breeches
in those days and, according to an old account, "the conner would spill
a little beer on a bench, and if his breeches stuck to the wood he
would adjudge the liquor to be of the required strength."
Renshaw had a hunch that modern methods were not much better. He did
not suspect the professional tasters of being fakers in any sense, but
he doubted that the human tongue was much more accurate than the seat
of the pants. He got no chance to test this theory, however, until
representatives of a large whisky company approached him a few years
ago.
They had a problem common to all whisky companies.
Except in the very worst grades, most whiskies of the same types
contain about the same amount of alcohol and have almost exactly the
same effect on the human system. Therefore the prime competitive
selling point is flavor. Truly sophisticated palates are rare, but most
people can detect differences in various brands and become attached to
particular flavors. When a whisky company hits upon a flavor which
proves popular, it can be worth millions of dollars to that company to
maintain that flavor.
But that's a tough trick to
do. No matter how rigidly the distilling and aging processes
are
controlled, no two runs of liquor taste exactly alike. Two batches of
grain, even if from adjacent fields and sometimes even if from two
parts of the same field, may result in widely different flavors. That
is the main reason why almost all whiskies are blended. That is also
why whisky companies pay up to $15,000 a year to the men known as
Tongues. By mixing various batches of liquor, then comparing the
results with previous stock, these Tongues try to keep the flavor
constant.
Every now and then, however, something seemed
to go wrong. There would be floods of kickbacks -- bottles and cases of
liquor returned by customers with the loud complaint that "this taste
awful; nothing like the last batch." Sometimes it was the customers'
fault; people will complain that the flavor of their favorite whisky,
coffee, cigarette, cheese or ice cream has been altered when actually
it was their own tastes that had changed. But in enough cases to worry
them considerably, the whisky companies discovered that the fault lay
in the product. What had gone wrong was a baffling mystery.
The company which approached Renshaw did not know whether he knew
anything about whisky, but it had heard of his work on taste. Could he
solve this mystery? The problem fascinated him, and he suspected that
he already knew the answer, but he did not want to leave teaching and
his wide-ranging psychological research. He recommended that the firm
hire E.H. Schofield, one of his most brilliant graduate students.
One of Schofield's first moves was to try much the same sort of trick
another assistant had pulled on Renshaw. The company had three Tongues
who were tops in their field. Schofield gave them identical samples and
asked them to report the differences they found. Being specialists,
they did not go nearly as far astray as Renshaw did, but still they
found differences. Without enlightening them, Schofield gave them
further tastes of the same samples the next day. This time they
reported new differences.
The test proved what Renshaw
had suspected -- that the bad batches were due to the fact that even
their highly sensitive tongues were liars. Again, no one got mad at
this trick, not even the experts. They were valued executives whose
jobs did not depend solely upon their palates, and when they saw that
the fault lay in themselves, they eagerly co-operated in finding a cure.
Renshaw and Schofield worked out a threefold plan. By scientific
training, they taught the three Tongues and a number of other people in
the company how to develop even sharper taste discrimination. They
invented a vocabulary of taste terms which permitted better-defined
reporting. But their main step was to do what psychologists call
"calibrating the reporters."
First they tested the three
experts to determine their "thresholds" and their "range of error."
Then they did the same thing with several dozen other employees, who
were enlisted as part-time tasters. This gave Renshaw and Schofield a
set of charts showing how often each of forty or fifty tasters was
wrong in a large number of tries, and to what extent each one went off
the beam.
Using these charts, they worked out complicated
mathematical formulas to be used on the future reports of these
tasters, individually and as a group. Given twenty samples of a man's
judgment on a certain subject, the psychologists can, with such
formulas, closely calculate the odds of his being right in further
judgments in the same field. Applied to nearly fifty tested people,
such formulas can virtually cancel the factor of human fallibility. The
result was that the company was able to confine the variations in the
flavor of its brand to a range within which the average drinker cannot
detect any difference.
The company was so impressed that
in addition to making Schofield an important executive and paying
Renshaw a handsome retainer to act as long-range consultant, it also
underwrote most of the cost of a taste laboratory at Ohio State. The
work is by no means confined to whisky. Most of it is basic research on
the psychological aspects of taste and smell, the two senses so far
most neglected by scientists. To this day, scientists do not agree on
how many taste buds there are in the human mouth, nor on exactly how
they operate. They are even less certain about how the sense of smell
works.
The taste lab is in a smallish room on the top
floor of a brick building on the campus. This writer approached it
eagerly toward the end of a weary day, having heard that Renshaw kept
quite a stock of fine whisky there, and having learned at firsthand
that in his own home Renshaw poured with a liberal hand for his guests.
But that afternoon he found no oasis. Renshaw keeps the laboratory
whisky under lock and key. The most wistful hints failed to register.
He brings it out only for experimental purposes, and he has a very
narrow view as to what constitutes an experiment. In five visits to the
laboratory, all this writer got was a few drops of distilled water.
Renshaw is very proud of his distilled water. After buying the purest
available, he redistills it several times to get as near to a tasteless
substance as possible. James B. Trump, one of his graduate students,
graciously offered to let me taste it. "See," he said triumphantly, "no
taste at all." Then, after fumbling with some bottles, he poured a few
drops of a fluid on my tongue and said, "Now tell me what you taste."
Savoring carefully, I reported a "very very faint sweet taste." Renshaw
and Trump grinned. I had fallen for one of the oldest psychological
tricks. The second fluid was the same tasteless stuff as the first,
but, expecting a taste, I got one.
At first quick glance,
the lab could be either a drab kitchen, a photographic darkroom with
the lights on, or the back room of a pharmacy. There is a beat-up old
dentist's chair in which the human guinea pigs sit while various
flavors are squirted onto their cupped tongues. It all seems very dull,
but in this room discoveries are being made which in a few years
probably will have tremendous effect upon the the flavor of hundreds of
food products.
Some of the things Renshaw and his
assistants can do are like a magician's show. For instance, using only
three chemicals -- ethyl acetate, butyl acetate and isopropyl --
Renshaw can imitate almost any flavor. He does it by mixing those
chemicals, by varying the concentrations and by changing the
temperatures of the solutions.
Some of the facts
established in that room belong under the heading of household hints.
For instance, tomato juice tastes best at about room temperature. When
chilled, it loses some of its subtler flavors, and if ice-cold, most of
the flavor disappears. Pineapple juice and orange juice, however, taste
better when somewhat chilled -- about the amount of chilling one ice
cube would give. When heated, pineapple juice tastes horribly nasty;
when overiced it is relatively insipid.
Whisky tastes
best at room temperature or slightly chilled. Excessive chilling brings
out unpleasant flavor components. If the whisky is warm, it is apt to
taste quite a bit like varnish, paint remover or shoe polish, depending
upon the brand.
Babies are likely to refuse their bottles
if the milk is as little as five degrees too hot or too cold. Mothers
therefore would be wise to use thermometers instead of the age-old
method of pouring a few drops on their wrists. Babies often reject
purees, too, not because they don't like the flavor but because the
temperature is a few degrees off from the point they prefer.
Every experiment he does further convinces Renshaw that most people are
only about 20 per cent alive, or, as he puts it, have achieved only "on
the order of twenty percentile utilization of the sense modalities."
Actually, he believes that in some respects the percentage is even
less. A set of experiments some years ago indicated that the so-called
sense of touch could be sharpened 700 per cent by a little practice.
Renshaw was working on the problem of how we feel things through our
skins. Many physiologists and anatomistss explain it by saying we have
specialized nerve endings which give the brain direct reports on
surface sensations. But others doubt that this is the whole answer. As
a psychologist, Renshaw believes that it is at best only a small
fraction of the answer.
In these experiments Renshaw
blindfolded his subjects and gently poked them at two points on their
forearms simultaneously. He wanted to find out how far apart the two
pressure points had to be before the subjects could detect two separate
pokes. He found that on the average person the pokes had to be at least
fourteen millimeters apart. At lesser distances the subjects couldn't tell
the difference between one poke and two. But after Renshaw made them
practice awhile, they were able to detect two gentle pokes only two
millimeters apart. This is one example of why Renshaw is convinced that
most people could learn to sharpen all their sense to a degree which
would enable them to do things now considered extraordinary. In vision
and memory, he seems to have quite well proved his theory. In
developing procedures for improving the sense of taste, he considers
himself still in the elementary stages. But he has trained scores of
students to detect and enjoy flavors that they did not even suspect
existed. Given a sip of lemonade, untrained students report it tastes
like "...well, like lemonade." After training, they can identify at
least a dozen flavors, several odors and various textures in lemonade.
They get a tremendous lot more pleasure out of savoring food and
drinks. And they need far less salt, pepper, sugar or any other
extraneous flavoring.
The woman who dumps three
teaspoonfuls of sugar in her coffee, the man who uses the pepper shaker
with a heavy hand, and those who say that all cigarettes taste alike
are, according to Renshaw, convicting themselves of being morons in the
sense of taste. The palate can be trained to get a great deal of flavor
out of an amazingly small amount. This is because all flavors -- in
fact, all things out of which we get sensation -- start reactions
which, if allowed to run their course unhampered, will continue to
build up sensation for some time. A little bit of sugar will start the
sensation of sweetness. Piling on more sugar can't do much more, and
may even blunt the reaction. Proceeding on the theory exemplified
above, Renshaw has even taught himself to get the same kick out of one
highball that he used to get out of four. "The trouble," he says, "is
that we don't allow the effect of that first drink to run its course.
If we get out of the way, the reaction to that drink may last an hour
or more. Pouring one drink atop another may make you very drunk, if
that's what you want, but insofar as pleasantly, mildly relaxing
effects are concerned, it is a waste of good liquor."
These tricks cannot, however, be learned in one easy lesson. There are,
unfortunately, no magic pills for any sort of self-improvement, whether
in whisky drinking or brain power. "You can't learn such things merely
by reading a book or a magazine article," Renshaw says; and if that
sounds too obvious to require statement, he can cite letters from
otherwise apparently intelligent people who have heard of some of his
work, begging him to give them the secret in a word or two.
Even diligent practice may not show immediate effects. Students
practicing on taste may go six weeks before there is any sharply
noticeable change in their performance, but when it comes the
improvement is dramatic. That phenomenon of sudden catching on is
typical of all learning, from the quantum theory to how to swing a golf
club properly. Psychologists explain it by the "law of unconscious
adoption of method." They say that in the early stages of learning
something new, when we seem to be getting practically nowhere, we
subconsciously are working out a key to the problem. When we find that
key we are able to let loose and use what we subconsciously learned
during the period when we seemed hopelessly stuck. William James, in
some respects the father of modern psychology, meant somewhat the same
sort of thing when he made the paradoxical remark that we learn to
ice-skate in the summer and to swim in the winter.
Another example lies in a phenomenon which occurs often to everyone. A
problem in studies or in everyday living may seem so complicated that
it is impossible to solve. The harder it is tackled, the worse the
apparent confusion. But the next morning the whole thing may seem
ridiculously simple. That is not merely because the mind is then rested
and fresh. All the ingredients of the solution had really been worked
out the day before, but not recognized as such and not put together
properly. During the night, the subconscious recognized the pattern
required to make the ingredients make sense.
Another
thing modern psychologists have proved is that we learn best when
forced to work things out for ourselves. Renshaw uses a form of this in
his classroom teaching. His lectures are apt to consist more of hints
and provocative but unfinished statements than of dogmatic explanation.
However, his classes nowadays are made up largely of veterans, who have
something of a hard-boiled, show-me attitude. Suspecting that he is
feeding them ivory-tower malarkey because he doesn't give concrete,
practical answers, they fire cynical questions. That sometimes goads
Renshaw into letting loose with a flood of demonstrated facts, couched
in scientific jargon, which leaves them looking as dazed as
shell-shocked men.
Renshaw says that nothing, not even
his study of Dr. Salo Finkelstein, the greatest scientifically proved
memory wizard ever known, has given him any solid indication of the
limits to which the human mind and senses can be trained. Renshaw
believes that each of us can do anything, within reason, that he wants
to do. He believes, for instance, that no otherwise normally
intelligent person is inherently "dumb in arithmetic" or "lacking in
card sense"; the only thing lacking, he says, is real desire to do
arithmetic or play cards well. He thinks it is the same with hearing --
except, of course, when there is disease or actual malformation -- with
taste, smell, vision and the so-called sense of touch. He even argues
that the fabulous eyesight of the Australian aborigine trackers, as
well as that attributed to American frontiersmen and Indians, is
explained simply by the fact that their desire for keen vision --
necessary for survival in their environment -- was so compelling that
they developed it. He claims that any normal modern man, even if he
wears glasses because he thinks he is nearsighted, could learn to equal
those legendary visual feats. In fact, Renshaw believes that all of us
are potential geniuses -- compared to current standards -- who merely
have not learned how to use the powers with which we were born.
(Thanks
to Mike Wittels, to Shorey Chapman and to Gus Linton. "You're Not
as Smart as You Could Be" originally ran in the Saturday Evening Post on April 17, April 24, and May 1, 1948.)
Background courtesy of Eos Development
