Gustatory pathway is somehow mapped to visual cortex
This reminds me of an interesting pair of this year's food technology diploma presentations with contrasting results in the domain of wine.
The first took a direct approach to the gustatory pathway -- in attempting to catalyze the production of volatiles, they discovered that, although chemical analysis revealed definite increases in volatile content, none of the human tasters noticed any difference in the end product.
The second was supposed to be a study on whether playing music would influence the perception of a wine -- and it certainly did: the tasters had a matrix of two wines and three pieces of music, but they marked their score sheets as if they'd been given six different wines!
I found it interesting that auditory experience proved more important than actual composition...
-Dave
