There was a news story making the rounds last week concerning some “pranksters” who “fooled” some people at a food-industry exposition in Houten, Netherlands by offering them fare from a local McDonald’s presented as though it were haute cuisine. That the “victims” of this stunt did not recognize they were being served regular fast food is not surprising. How we perceive and evaluate sensory data is predicated on (primarily) two factors: 1) the context in which the sensory stimuli is encountered; 2) expectations about the nature of the sensory stimuli to be received.
While many people understand the importance of context in matters of communication and language (e.g., a word, a sentence, or a quote shorn of its context can render a vastly different meaning from the writer/speaker’s intentions) , not many are aware our perceptual mechanisms, how we interpret stimuli across all of the senses, is context sensitive. What we taste, smell, touch, hear and see is also dependent on the context in which those senses are activated. And, as noted above, our prior expectations about the nature of the sensory stimuli we anticipate encountering greatly colors our interpretation of such stimuli—particularly if we are aware of or are told the value associated with said stimuli.
For example, numerous experiments have demonstrated time and time again, human beings— even trained or acknowledged experts—are incapable of identifying or distinguishing qualitative differences between sense stimuli when pertinent context is removed. One may fervently believe a Stradivarius violin (with a price tag in the millions of dollars) simply must sound better than a contemporary violin and that a concert violinist could readily recognize the superior tone of the former instrument. However, such a belief is not supported by the evidence.
I first discovered the connection between context, sense perception and cognition in the work of Gregory Bateson thirty years ago. To say the idea was revelatory would be something of an understatement. I immediately understood this knowledge or understanding of how our perceptual mechanisms actually function had widespread ramifications across the broad spectrum of human experience. Most pointedly, I now had a tool with which to address several troubling issues and questions within the realm of aesthetics. In the weeks ahead, I will expand on some of these issues/questions in more detail.