Abstract
With high-end chefs being increasingly considered as artists, gastronomy offers a new domain for our understanding of creativity. As several claims have been made about the link between synaesthesia and creativity, one would expect to find at least as many synaesthetes among chefs as among painters, composers, or writers—and perhaps even more—given the highly multisensory nature of the culinary arts. Here, we examine why synaesthesia is still under-reported among creative chefs. Does the absence of such reports merely reflect the fact that synaesthesia is so overly common when it comes to the chemical senses to even merit attention, or on the contrary, that synaesthesia involving the chemical senses (i.e. smell, taste, or their composite, flavour) as either the “inducer” or “concurrent” is really rare? An alternative explanation, which we advance here, is that synaesthetic creativity, when expressed in edible form, may simply not be very tasty: As such, the very fact that the fruits of the artist’s work are consumed may fundamentally distinguish the culinary arts from other inedible forms of art.
Highlights
Chefs are increasingly being considered as the artists of the kitchen [1]
Evidence collected over the last century or so suggests that synaesthesia may underlie much creative thinking and be over-represented among artists and art students [4,5,6,7]
The absence is especially striking at the present time, given both the huge public exposure of many chefs these days [37, 38], not to mention the explosive growth of interest in multisensory dining and multisensory experience design [20, 39,40,41,42] and the seeming overrepresentation of synaesthetes in the other arts ([5, 7]; though see [14])
Summary
Chefs are increasingly being considered as the artists of the kitchen [1]. Even those who would tend to disagree with this label [2] still accept high-end gastronomy as a truly creative endeavour. If synaesthesia needs to be idiosyncratic and consistent over time, the fact that taste-smell confusions are so common and that novel smells can acquire a particular taste association within just a few trials might mean that one would not want to count these broad tendencies as synaesthesia [18, 30] With this more constraining definition of synaesthesia in hand, we would expect chefs to come out with specific cases where smells or tastes induce atypical experiences in other modalities (e.g. colours and sounds) or are systematically experienced when other non-chemical objects (e.g. shapes, words, and music) are presented. If idiosyncratic associations that are experienced by synaesthetes, at least in the audiovisual domain, tend to be more liked by
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