Drink wine with care. Drinking wine is the ideal workout for your brain, engaging more parts of our grey matter than any other behaviour, according to a neuroscientist.
Dr Gordon Shepherd, from the Yale School of Medicine, said sniffing and analysing a wine before drinking it requires “exquisite control of one of the biggest muscles in the body”.
When the drinker swirls the liquid around their mouth, the tongue’s intricate muscles are put to work along with thousands of taste and odour receptors. He said that the overall process engaged the brain more than listening to music or solving a difficult maths problem.
Shepherd coined the term “neurogastronomy” to describe the study of how the brain created the perception of flavour. He said the movement of wine through the mouth and alcohol-infused air through the nose causes the brain to conjure up a flavour. The most important part of this “brain activation” comes when we breath out wine-infused air after taking in a sniff, he added.
“The molecules in the wine don’t have taste or flavour, but when they stimulate our brains, the brain creates flavour the same way it creates colour,” he said. The brain builds a picture of colours in the mind using information from the eyes about how light hits the objects around us.
