I have a question.

[conuly]

An unanswerable question, to be sure, but listen anyway.

I like certain foods. Other people dislike some of the foods I like, while I dislike foods that *they* like. Do the foods I dislike actually taste different to me than they do to the people who like them?

Comments

[conuly]

On that note, pastel yellow is evil. *shudders*

Seriously, though, how do we know things taste different? We say that they do, but... if azarias says that cilantro "tastes like soap", how do we know if what she says soap tastes like is what I would say soap tastes like (and why is it that even very pretty smelling shampoos taste nasty?)

[leora.livejournal.com]

Well, we can't know what soap tastes like to her, but we can do same/different tests. If these two things taste the same to person A and different to person B, there's a difference in the perception. We can never be sure of exactly what that difference is, but we can be sure the difference is there.

I've done this with my mother to determine her degree of tone deafness, which is extreme. I don't know what sounds sound like to her, but she can't tell a C from an G even to the extent of reliably saying whether they are the same note or a different note. And I'm not even talking about comparing low Cs and high Cs to see if she can match them, just an absolute, did I hit the same key on the piano or a different one - and she can't tell. She can't tell the difference between a nice chord, like c major and my best attempt to hit clashing sounds. Neither sounds better to her. So, it's pretty clear that she perceives sound differently. You can run similar tests on taste.