Before you know it,
you have already heard
You walked in, took two steps, haven’t seen or touched anything yet.
Yet something has already changed. You don’t know it yet, but your nervous system has.
Before the conscious mind registers a piece of information, the body has already responded. The temperature of the air. The acoustic pressure of the room. A smell that you cannot identify but that your brain has already classified as familiar, as safe, as strange. These signals don’t come through reasoning. They go straight to where they need to go: to the limbic system, to the amygdala, to the circuits that manage alertness, pleasure, emotional memory. They come before words. Before thought. This process is called subconscious processing. It means that you are already having the experience at the moment when you think you haven’t even started it yet.
What you feel in the first course doesn’t just depend on what’s on your plate. It depends on everything your nervous system has already picked up in the preceding minutes: the light you walked through, the sound that greeted you, the rhythm with which you sat down. Every variable has already been read, weighed, integrated. The brain has already constructed an expectation. And that expectation, as decades of research on perception show, physically changes what you will perceive. In fact, you are not waiting for the experience to begin. The experience has already begun.
Memory has a taste
There is a flavor that you know without knowing where it comes from. Even if you cannot name it or place it, it is unmistakable. Something inside you recognizes it before you have time to think about it. Smell is the only sense that does not pass through the thalamus-the filter through which all other sensory signals pass before reaching the cortex. It goes straight to the amygdala, the hippocampus, the systems that manage emotional memory and instinctive response. That’s why a scent can take you back to a place you haven’t been in 20 years before you even know what you’re smelling. That is why certain flavors carry with them something you cannot describe: a weight, a light, a physical sensation that does not belong in the present.
Your past seasons every dish. Not metaphorically. Every taste experience you have had has left a neurological trace, and that trace is active every time you eat. You are always tasting something for the first time and simultaneously through the filter of everything you have already experienced. The two processes are anatomically linked. What we bring to the table is not just hunger, but our whole sensory history. And that history, willingly or unwillingly, eats with us.
Every meal is a ritual,
whether you want it or not
You can call it dinner or experience. Or don’t call it anything and just sit at a counter in downtown Milan at 8:30 in the evening. Nothing changes. In fact, the ritual has already begun. The human unconscious does not distinguish between a sacred ritual and dinner in a strange place. What distinguishes is the quality of the stimuli, the coherence of the sequence, the ability of the environment to create an altered state of attention and presence. Fire, drum, scent, fasting are the tools that shamanic cultures around the world have used for millennia. They were empirical and alchemical neuroscience. Centuries of observing how the nervous system, and beyond, responds to certain stimuli, how to lower the critical threshold, how to open something that usually remains closed.
There is no such thing as a neutral meal. Every variable-the light, the sound, the posture, who sits next to you, the name of the dish, the silence before it arrives-alters the experience. It doesn’t just color it, it constitutes it. The context is not the setting of the meal. The context is the plate. What the shaman knew, and what modern cooking has almost completely forgotten, is that feeding someone does not mean filling their stomach. It means creating the conditions for something to move inside. At a level that language struggles to reach. The ritual is not a decoration. It is the ingredient that does not appear on the menu.
Sound is an ingredient
Take two glasses of the same wine, from the same bottle, same temperature, same light. Have the first drinker listen to a sequence of high, bright, metallic notes. To the other, low, warm, round frequencies. Ask them both to describe what they are drinking. They will not say the same thing. It is from this kind of experiment that the concept of sonic seasoning was born: the discovery, systematized by Prof. Charles Spence of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at theUniversity of Oxford, that specific sound frequencies modify taste perception in a direct and measurable way. Not suggestion or placebo effect. High frequencies tend to enhance sweetness and sourness. Low frequencies amplify bitterness and roundness. In fact, sound does not accompany what you eat; sound changes what you eat.
We wanted to understand what happens when this principle is applied not in a laboratory, nor in a traditional restaurant, but within an immersive experience, with eleven people sitting at a counter, immersed in a precisely constructed sensory context. In collaboration with Prof. Charles Spence, we measured, documented, and published the results in theInternational Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science (Crying over food: an extraordinary response to a multisensory eating experience). What we found confirms what those sitting at that counter hear every night: sound is structure, not background. It is an integral part of what the brain calls “flavor.” Nothing you perceive at the table is just food. The brain does not process the senses in separate compartments, it integrates them, makes them talk to each other, merges them into one perception. What you hear with your ears becomes part of what you hear with your mouth. What you perceive with your skin, such as the temperature of the air, the vibration of the counter, enters into the final calculation. Sound is an ingredient, just like salt or fire. You just don’t see it on the plate. And maybe that’s why it works even better.
The unconscious eats first
You don’t decide whether you like something, but you are actually the last to know. Someone else has already eaten before you: that part of you that has no name, that doesn’t reason, that doesn’t speak. The autonomic nervous system. The amygdala. The pleasure and alertness circuits that learned to recognize danger and nurture long before language existed. They have already evaluated, already responded, already decided. You are just receiving the result of a deliberation you have not conducted. Taste is, in a very precise sense, a lie that the brain tells. Not a bad lie, but a construction. The brain takes raw signals and turns them into a coherent experience, colored by expectations, emotional state, personal history.
The emotion you bring to the table is a taste threshold. You are sad and the food tastes differently. You are present, open, slightly disoriented, suddenly perceiving nuances you didn’t find before. Where food ends and perception begins is impossible to determine. Unfortunately, that boundary does not exist. Esiste solo l’evento: il momento in cui uno stimolo esterno incontra un sistema nervoso specifico, con la sua storia, il suo stato, la sua soglia. Eating is an alchemical act. The plate is only the beginning of the conversation.
Before you know it, you have already heard
You walked in, took two steps, haven’t seen or touched anything yet. Yet something has already changed. You don’t know it yet, but your nervous system does.
Before the conscious mind registers a piece of information, the body has already responded. The temperature of the air. The acoustic pressure of the room. A smell that you cannot identify but that your brain has already classified as familiar, as safe, as strange. These signals don’t come through reasoning. They go straight to where they need to go: to the limbic system, to the amygdala, to the circuits that manage alertness, pleasure, emotional memory. They come before words. Before thought. This process is called subconscious processing. It means that you are already having the experience at the moment when you think you haven’t even started it yet.
What you feel in the first course doesn’t just depend on what’s on your plate. It depends on everything your nervous system has already picked up in the preceding minutes: the light you walked through, the sound that greeted you, the rhythm with which you sat down. Every variable has already been read, weighed, integrated. The brain has already constructed an expectation. And that expectation, as decades of research on perception show, physically changes what you will perceive. In fact, you are not waiting for the experience to begin. The experience has already begun.
Memory has a taste
There is a flavor that you know without knowing where it comes from. Even if you cannot name it or place it, it is unmistakable. Something inside you recognizes it before you have time to think about it. Smell is the only sense that does not pass through the thalamus-the filter through which all other sensory signals pass before reaching the cortex. It goes straight to the amygdala, the hippocampus, the systems that manage emotional memory and instinctive response. That’s why a scent can take you back to a place you haven’t been in 20 years before you even know what you’re smelling. That is why certain flavors carry with them something you cannot describe: a weight, a light, a physical sensation that does not belong in the present.
Your past seasons every dish. Not metaphorically. Every taste experience you have had has left a neurological trace, and that trace is active every time you eat. You are always tasting something for the first time and simultaneously through the filter of everything you have already experienced. The two processes are anatomically linked. What we bring to the table is not just hunger, but our whole sensory history. And that history, willingly or unwillingly, eats with us.
Every meal is a ritual,
whether you want it or not
You can call it dinner or experience. Or don’t call it anything and just sit at a counter in downtown Milan at 8:30 in the evening. Nothing changes. In fact, the ritual has already begun. The human unconscious does not distinguish between a sacred ritual and dinner in a strange place. What distinguishes is the quality of the stimuli, the coherence of the sequence, the ability of the environment to create an altered state of attention and presence. Fire, drum, scent, fasting are the tools that shamanic cultures around the world have used for millennia. They were empirical and alchemical neuroscience. Centuries of observing how the nervous system, and beyond, responds to certain stimuli, how to lower the critical threshold, how to open something that usually remains closed.
There is no such thing as a neutral meal. Every variable-the light, the sound, the posture, who sits next to you, the name of the dish, the silence before it arrives-alters the experience. It doesn’t just color it, it constitutes it. The context is not the setting of the meal. The context is the plate. What the shaman knew, and what modern cooking has almost completely forgotten, is that feeding someone does not mean filling their stomach. It means creating the conditions for something to move inside. At a level that language struggles to reach. The ritual is not a decoration. It is the ingredient that does not appear on the menu.
Sound is an ingredient
Take two glasses of the same wine, from the same bottle, same temperature, same light. Have the first drinker listen to a sequence of high, bright, metallic notes. To the other, low, warm, round frequencies. Ask them both to describe what they are drinking. They will not say the same thing. It is from this kind of experiment that the concept of sonic seasoning was born: the discovery, systematized by Prof. Charles Spence of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at theUniversity of Oxford, that specific sound frequencies modify taste perception in a direct and measurable way. Not suggestion or placebo effect. High frequencies tend to enhance sweetness and sourness. Low frequencies amplify bitterness and roundness. In fact, sound does not accompany what you eat; sound changes what you eat.
We wanted to understand what happens when this principle is applied not in a laboratory, nor in a traditional restaurant, but within an immersive experience, with eleven people sitting at a counter, immersed in a precisely constructed sensory context. In collaboration with Prof. Charles Spence, we measured, documented, and published the results in theInternational Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science (Crying over food: an extraordinary response to a multisensory eating experience). What we found confirms what those sitting at that counter hear every night: sound is structure, not background. It is an integral part of what the brain calls “flavor.” Nothing you perceive at the table is just food. The brain does not process the senses in separate compartments, it integrates them, makes them talk to each other, merges them into one perception. What you hear with your ears becomes part of what you hear with your mouth. What you perceive with your skin, such as the temperature of the air, the vibration of the counter, enters into the final calculation. Sound is an ingredient, just like salt or fire. You just don’t see it on the plate. And maybe that’s why it works even better.
Sound is an ingredient
Take two glasses of the same wine, from the same bottle, same temperature, same light. Have the first drinker listen to a sequence of high, bright, metallic notes. To the other, low, warm, round frequencies. Ask them both to describe what they are drinking. They will not say the same thing. It is from this kind of experiment that the concept of sonic seasoning was born: the discovery, systematized by Prof. Charles Spence of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at theUniversity of Oxford, that specific sound frequencies modify taste perception in a direct and measurable way. Not suggestion or placebo effect. High frequencies tend to enhance sweetness and sourness. Low frequencies amplify bitterness and roundness. In fact, sound does not accompany what you eat; sound changes what you eat.
We wanted to understand what happens when this principle is applied not in a laboratory, nor in a traditional restaurant, but within an immersive experience, with eleven people sitting at a counter, immersed in a precisely constructed sensory context. In collaboration with Prof. Charles Spence, we measured, documented, and published the results in theInternational Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science (Crying over food: an extraordinary response to a multisensory eating experience). What we found confirms what those sitting at that counter hear every night: sound is structure, not background. It is an integral part of what the brain calls “flavor.” Nothing you perceive at the table is just food. The brain does not process the senses in separate compartments, it integrates them, makes them talk to each other, merges them into one perception. What you hear with your ears becomes part of what you hear with your mouth. What you perceive with your skin, such as the temperature of the air, the vibration of the counter, enters into the final calculation. Sound is an ingredient, just like salt or fire. You just don’t see it on the plate. And maybe that’s why it works even better.
