 Good evening, everybody. So thank you, Victoria, for such a lovely introduction. I am indeed a PhD researcher in neuroscience. I do work on product perception. So I look at when you see a bottle of something or a package of something, how does the information on the package and everything you see around it and smell around it influence your perception of the product? I look at it from the brain side of things. So I want to find out what actually happens in your brain. But it is a bit of a messy and complicated endeavor, so I will not talk about that today. Instead, I will talk about the cool side of things. So I will be talking about food perception and we'll focus on some aspects of it which you will find out in the next minutes. So let's begin with a small experiment. Raise your hands, who of which thinks that this drink over here, this red drink, tastes salty? Who thinks it might taste sweet? An overwhelming majority, all right. What about this green drink over here? Is it bitter? Maybe a little bit. Is it sour? More sour, is it sweet? Less so. How about this drink over here? Is it salty, sweet, sour? It's a little bit more messy, isn't it? You have a lot of colors coming together and maybe if you had this specific cocktail at some point, you know what it tastes like. But if you haven't, you're getting a lot of information. So you might be asking yourself, why the hell is she talking about colors and tastes in the same sentence? Now, we generally think that food is about food and taste, right, you put it in your mouth, you taste it. But in reality, there is so much more to it. We know that all of these senses, so hearing, vision, touch, temperature, a lot of things around food contribute to how you perceive food and what it tastes like. Talking about all of this goes way beyond the scope of 15 minutes. So today, we will focus on a very specific aspect of food perception, and that is vision. When we think about vision, one of the main concepts that comes to our mind is color. So if you look around without paying too much attention to what you're looking at, you notice the colors first. So color is a really powerful tool when it comes to food. And just as we've seen at the beginning with a little experiment, you strongly associate some colors with some flavors. This has been done experimentally. So in one of the studies, a bunch of crazy scientists at Oxford, however cliche that sounds that actually happened, took a bunch of people, set them at the desk, and gave them jelly pallets. So these four jelly pallets have zero flavor, absolutely none. Their chemical composition is identical with a tiny exception of food coloring. And no food coloring does not influence the flavor. They are absolutely identical and flavorless. However, when asked to rate how these pallets might taste like, there was an overwhelming agreement that the red palette, as you said at the beginning, is for some reason always sweet. The green palette is always sour or majorly sour. The black palette is majorly bitter and the white palette is majorly salty. Now you might think to yourself, well, this is nonsense that is done in the lab. You could never fool me like that in real life. If you look at M&M's, you might have thought they're all of different flavors, but that is one big fat lie. They are, in fact, all identical. So if you close your eyes, you will never be able to guess which M&M tastes what. They're all absolutely the same. And in fact, this really strong influence of color on our perception of food is so overwhelming that sometimes we use color to guide our understanding of flavors. So let's look at this big wheel. This is something that is used by professional coffee tasters. So every single word that you can see around here represents a subtle note, a subtle flavor of coffee. And as you can see, it's color-coded. Now the reason it is color-coded is because when professional coffee tasters are asked to identify the flavors and notes and coffee, for some reason it's easier for them to say, this tastes somehow red-ish, and then they go to pick on the specific flavor dimension that it might be than to first say, oh, it tastes of coconut. So this really strong association of flavor and color is there, is consistent, and it's really hard to fight. In fact, it's used in marketing all the time. So all of us have probably had retrospect at some point. There was a lot of wonderful flavors. They're all fantastic, and it's sometimes difficult to choose. And what we don't want to happen is for you to go into the store, get to the stand and be like, holy hell, I have to read all of these labels for like half an hour now and take the flavor that I want. Now companies want to avoid that, and what they do is give colors to labels so that you can know what you want to eat before you know what you want to eat and before you've read anything. So if you look at this bar over here, those of you in the back might not be able to read what it says, but you see that it's green, and somewhere deep down you know it's going to be a little bit tingly, a little bit refreshing. And in fact, that flavor is peppermint. This bar over here is bright red, and you know that red is sweet, so you know that that bar of chocolate will be overwhelmingly sweet. And it is in fact flavored of marzipan. And if you go through each one of these bars one by one, you'll be able to notice the subtle connections between the colors and the flavors that they represent. But what else is out there? So I mentioned that color is the first thing that you notice when you look at something. Well, the second thing that you notice when you look at something is the shape of the object. So let's talk about the shape. Now, I'm not going to go into the geometry of things. We're not interested in triangles and squares, but we're talking about the fundamental property of the shapes, and that is the pointiness. So squares and triangles are pointy and the roundness. So circles, ovals are more round. Now let's see how the shape influences what your flavor is like. In this study, a bunch of scientists took a bunch of people and presented them with shapes. The shapes were of two types. Some of them were more like stars, so they had a lot of protrusions that were very pointy. You could have more of them like here or less of them like here. They could be symmetrical or not, but they were all pointy. On the other hand, some of the shapes were more round, so each protrusion was a bit more like a petal. It was more rounded, more soft to it. And what the people were asked to do is to say what this shape tastes like, and consistently, and overwhelmingly, and from different countries as well, people would rate rounder shapes as sweet and pointy shapes as sour. Now, the same way as it is with color, shape is also used in marketing every day. So if you look at these two bottles of water, they're both produced by the same company, Sampa Allegrino, but this bottle over here, to my right, has a star as its symbol. The pointy edges of the star indicate that it's going to be sparkling. This water over here, on the other hand, has a much more rounded shape to it, so you can see these round petals, you can see the round elements over here. This all indicates that the water will be soft, almost hugging you. And that water is still. Now, those of you who are very attentive to detail might also notice that there is a difference in the names. So the sparkling water is called Sampa Allegrino, and the still water is called Aquapanna. Both of them are produced by the same company called Sampa Allegrino, but for some reason, for the still water, the name is changed. And if you try to say those words and listen to those words, you will realize that those names have, for example, roundness to the words Aquapanna, they sound round, whatever that is, or they sound a bit more spiky and pointy, like Sampa Allegrino. We can discuss in the break a bit more detail on how you use words to deliver information that is really not acoustic. Now, let's look at these two beautiful plates. Let's bring together shape, color, and flavor. If you look at this plate over here, you will see that we have a round dessert. It's pink, it's beautiful, it has these dots of red, probably strawberry or raspberry sauce, but at the same time, it has little spikes. And it has little dots of green. This plate, on the other hand, is a bit more pointy, so the ends are a bit more pointy. It's overwhelmingly lime green, but at the same time, it has soft and round dots of this sauce. Now, the reason these plates are plated like that is because here, what the culinary artists want to deliver to you is that this plate, the undertone, the fundamental flavor is sweet, is rich and velvety sweet, but there is a bit of tingle. And the tingle is brought to you by the spikes and by the little green leaves. At the same time on this plate, where the overwhelming flavor might be tingly and sparkling and a bit punchy, you want to balance it out and add some soft and sweet dimension. And you do this with the little sweet round dots. Now, you might look at these plates and say, well, this goes well beyond food. It looks like art. And in fact, the inspiration to combine colors and shapes and different things together to deliver a message has not originated from plate artists. If you look at the history of art and as you can see outside in the display today, art is all about combining different things to deliver one coherent, comprehensive, multi-dimensional message. And if we take inspiration in the art and put it together with our food, we get magic. So in this experiment, a painting by Kandinsky was taken as inspiration. And you can see here that there is just an overload of different textures and shapes and strokes and directions and colors, and all of it together creates a perception. It doesn't matter whether you like it or not, but it makes you feel something. Now, what the researchers did was take this painting's inspiration and then use a bunch of ingredients to create plates that would either resemble the painting or have nothing to do with it. So in this plate over here, they put different ingredients together in a more abstract and a more interactive and interesting way to kind of resemble the painting over here. Here, all of the same ingredients, it might not look that way, but all of the same ingredients were just stuck together in a pile. And over here, they were put in a neat presentation. People were giving three plates, not told anything about the painting. Just given the three plates and asked, write what you taste. And overwhelmingly, repeatedly, and almost without failure, people would always say that this plate over here is more flavorful, more interesting, has more dimension and skill to it, and they would pay much more for it. So let's bring it all together. An interesting question, of course, is how do we bridge this gap? We have colors, and then we have shapes, and then we have flavors, and then we have a lot of other things. So the question is, how can these all come together and create a single percept? There is no really definite theory or hypothesis on how this might happen. It's, as you can imagine, a very complicated thing to investigate, but researchers have made some suggestions. And one of such theories is that when you see a product, one of the two things happens. So, for example, if you see this little star, it's a chocolate star, and you try to decide what does it taste like before you've actually put it in your mouth, one of the two things could happen. So on one hand, you might say, it's like a chocolate, I've tasted chocolates before, those taste sweet, this star must be sweet. Boom, done. Sweet, easy. Another thing that might happen, however, is if the shape of the food you're tasting or the color is a little bit less usual, you might not have encountered it before, it's less straightforward, is that your brain tries to bring up associations that it has to something that isn't common. So, for example, with this star, the slightly pointy edges might bring an association with a pointy edge of the knife. And therefore, you might think that this star, the same way as the knife is prickly, will give you a bit of a prickly flavor. And if you do not believe me, you can Google it, and you will find a paper that has shown the chocolates that are square are consistently rated as more bitter than those chocolates that are round. Now, let's bring this all together. So, the things that I want you to remember. First of all, is there is way more to food than just taste. There is color, there is shape, but there's also things like music, like background, like temperature, like smells. It's such a multi-dimensional endeavor that once you start digging into it, you will realize that there is just no end. The second thing that I want you to remember is that your expectations of food influence your perception. So, if you think that you will not like the plate of broccoli, you will not like that healthy plate of broccoli. So try to convince yourself that it's going to be good, and maybe you can trick your brain. And finally, if you don't believe me, you can try it out yourself. So next day you go to a restaurant, first read the name and see, what does that sound like? What do I think it will taste like? Then get the plate. Look at the plate and see, what does this look like it tastes like? Make up those images and those flavors in your head. Then taste it, and you might be surprised. Thank you. Thank you, Natalia. I see there are some questions. Please wait for the microphone to come to you, that we all can hear you. Yes, one on the back. This was really a fascinating topic. Thank you. In the Oxford study, you showed these jelly shots, but they did not have any flavor. And then the question, the correct answer, them being all the same flavor, was not in the questionnaire. Do you know if the answers of the volunteers changed if you added the correct answer to the study? The question is, if we understood correctly, there was no answer, no flavor to the Oxford study. Do you think it would be different if there was five answers, like four tastes and one no flavor? It's a very interesting question. In general, the concept of bias is quite complicated. So even though I see where you're coming from, perhaps if you give people the option to say that this tastes of nothing, some people would choose that. But we also do know that even, not in this study, but in other studies, when given that option, people are still biased. So the fact that something is red might overwhelm the fact that you think there is no flavor, because you don't know whether there is flavor or not, so you might still think that there is a flavor, and the probability of you saying that the red palate is sweet would still be higher than you saying that it's sour. Okay, there's another question over here. Could you please bring us the microphone as well here in the front? Thank you. That was a really interesting topic. I would like to ask what happens when a person has color blindness, let's say, or dichromacy? How does that affect food preferences? Also a very interesting question. So how does the color blindness or some deficiency in color perception can influence the feeling of the taste in this person? Okay. That is a fascinating question. I do not know the straightforward answer to that. I have not read papers. However, I would speculate that color blindness doesn't mean that people see entirely in black and white. So you still see a spectrum of different colors that still differentiate between each other. So they're little hues, they're different between like the two shades, so they might not be as noticeable to you, but somebody who is colorblind, they are. And the point of these associations is not that the truly red is sweet, is that this color spectrum is associated with this flavor. So I would speculate that colorblind people might not have the exact same color-flavor associations because they don't see the exact same colors, but conceptually they would still associate certain things that they see with certain flavors, if that makes sense. So it might not be the same color as you, but it will be a color that they see that will be strongly linked to a flavor that they experience. Thank you. There are some more questions. Yes, let's take this one over there in the middle. Yes. First of all, thank you very much. It was really interesting. What I'm curious about is where is it all going? Like, what is there something that hasn't been researched before, or what's going to be there in five years? Is there something that we don't know yet? Yes. Or, yeah. Thank you. So the question is what's the future of this that is what will be coming up in five, ten years from now? This is a very interesting question. So as you might imagine, this is a very heavily sort of marketing business-oriented side of things, so people want to find out how to deliver the maximum experience to you. And although we do know quite a lot on colors and certain shapes, there are certain aspects of sensory perception that we are not so clear on, and that can come to smells as well as to things like audition or the semantic information of the words that are on the labels. So for example, the work that I'm doing at the moment is dedicated to actually looking at the meaning of the words that you read on labels and how that influences your perception and that you can, without changing the actual product, change the words that you put on the product and that will change how you think it tastes. So, yes. I do think that, of course, in certain avenues it's a little bit more limited, although there is a big scope for color combinations, for instance, and stuff like that, but there was just so many senses we haven't uncovered yet that there was a big playground. Thank you. You are welcome to come in five years to our 15 by 4 event, and Natalia will tell us everything to discover since then. I'll be done with my PhD by then. Yes, we hope that you will tell about your great discoveries. Let's take another question from middle here, please. Where all these things come from? Genetic base, cultural, memetics? So what's the natural basis of this happening, of this combination of taste and colors fascinating thing to look at. So the first thing that we definitely know about this is that it's relatively universal. So people across different cultures will associate certain flavors to certain shapes and certain colors quite consistently. So it's probably not a cultural thing per se, but something that goes deeper than that. I wouldn't make claims about the genetics because the geneticists in the room would probably confirm that doing some sort of sequencing study on this would be basically very complicated, to say the least, but what I would assume and what the speculation at the moment is is that evolutionary, we are conditioned to associate, for example, certain flavors to certain colors. So you know that a banana that is really, really ripe, that is bright yellow, is sweet, but a banana that is still really green is gonna be more bitter. So things like that is passed on through generations, and you can ask the geneticists, I know that there was some epigenetic stuff to it, but that's not really my alley, but I certainly know that that is passed down the generations, and we get brought up in a way that we associate certain flavors and shapes to certain colors and the other way around. So I wouldn't say that it's cultural per se, although of course there will be a cultural component because it's impossible to negate the influence of what you see around you every day, but fundamentally the most basic things probably come from just very simple associations of what is safe, what is tasty, what the fruits and vegetables around us look like. Thank you. There are many more questions. I have to ask you to please ask them from Natalia in a few minutes, and now let's thank her for her great talk. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you.