Transcriber: Emma Gon Reviewer: omar idmassaoud
Golnoosh Mahdavi: As I stand in this room,
I can’t help but feel a connection to history.
Who lived here? What were their experiences like?
What noises could be heard?
I have no choice but to resort to my imagination,
to form my own perception of what life was like
hundreds of years ago.
We navigate through life by reflecting our memories,
by reasoning and by making decisions.
It’s these processes that we classify as our human experience.
An experience which is constantly built on senses, the ability to see,
the ability to smell and the ability to touch.
In fact, there are specific areas of the brain
dedicated to carrying out these functions.
And this is precisely where our job plays a role -
understanding these functions through data collected from the brain itself.
Yet our experience of the world is subjective,
so personal that these processes come to us naturally.
We tend to forget the complexity of what goes on backstage behind closed doors,
the complexity of the subconscious.
Through applied neuroscience,
we begin to get a glimpse into this very important part of our world
that would otherwise be completely invisible to us.
Dhyana Menon: But can the brain alone make the invisible visible?
I’m skeptical.
Neurobiology is an important piece of the puzzle,
but this lens doesn’t give us a complete picture of the entire story.
Everyone of us was born into a unique body, family and culture.
And our experiences are the product of the dynamic relationship
of all these things, just like wine.
Grapes picked from this vineyard, 12 years ago,
transformed into a singular bottle of wine.
If we were to study the physical properties of the wine as it exists today,
we’d miss the most important ingredients from which this wine came to be,
like the climate, the minerals in the soil the nearby flowers and trees.
Even the age of the wine barrels in which these grapes fermented
will affect the way that the wine will eventually taste.
Grapes grow and transform in unique ways due to so many different factors.
Just like our brains, our evolutionary origins,
the families we were born into,
our cultural communities that we reside in.
All create and contribute to the complexity of who we are.
Mario Ubiali: And yet there must be a way to navigate that sea of complexity.
We must find an answer to all of those questions
that our customers and partners come to us with.
These complex deep questions about the relationship between humans and food.
How do you go about finding that answer?
A long time ago, we realized neuroscience alone wouldn’t be enough.
It's much like trying to navigate
a never changing landscape like this one around me now,
a landscape of sand dunes.
You really want to go about that landscape with a predetermined map.
Something that tells you a trajectory that is going to be impossible to apply.
Or would you rather go for a direction
and maybe switch to searching for a compass?
Well, we have searched and found a compass.
That compass for us is what we call cultural neuroscience.
We believe with cultural neuroscience,
we can seek those answers to complex questions.
We can look into the depth of multilayered factors.
And this is where you need to put together a series of lenses,
not just one through which you’re trying to interpret reality.
More, more lenses, one of brain data, the lens of emotions,
the lens of food, and ultimately, the lens of culture.
That compass to us is a way to say
we refuse to go down the rabbit hole
of the obsession for deterministic control.
GM: We all have this deep seated desire for control.
It stems from our need to define our answers
and also be in charge of our personal narrative.
But why is that?
Because our choices and preferences are often shaped
by reasons we may be unaware of.
But what if I told you that your brain electrical activity
can tell a completely different story about your emotions
and your level of attention compared to your subjective feedback?
And you may be wondering, why is that?
That’s because most of your choices you’re unaware of.
Many of our impulsive choices are driven by emotion.
Our habits are formed through repetition.
I often wonder why do I eat what I do?
Growing up in an Indian family, living in Dubai, studying in the UK,
I’m now working in Italy, how did it shape my perception of food?
This is why it is worth investigating the mechanisms which go on
in the minds of individuals while they’re engaging in experiences,
experiences which are essential to our survival, like the experience of food.
In our research, we evaluate the brain’s responses
to certain textures, flavors and ingredients
providing a holistic vision of human interaction with food.
DM: Food builds worlds,
our eating habits are shaped by our cultures,
the places we live, our genetics and even our beliefs.
Foods are at the beginning of every civilization
and are the basis of the stories that we grew up with,
even to this day.
What we eat touches us
in so many different dimensions of our lives
that is a topic of serious interest in both the sciences and the humanities.
I personally tried to study food all throughout my life.
First as a child of my mother, who’s a brilliant cook of Iranian cuisine,
then as a young neuroscientist in school studying the effects
of a shared communal meal on recovery from depression.
And in most recently, I found myself as a professional cook
in a fine dining Italian kitchen.
If there's one thing that I've noticed throughout all of my experiences,
it’s that all of these worlds studying food
in unique ways are making brilliant discoveries.
And yet I’ve also noticed
that they are almost never talking to each other.
We are trying to change that.
To understand human experience more fully,
we study food through the prism of cultural neuroscience,
how our stories and our bodies interact.
We believe that by studying foods effects on the mind and the brain,
we can begin to bridge the gap between our personal and societal needs
and bring forth a sustainable future grounded in a simple truth.
That we all eat to nourish, flourish, survive and celebrate.
MU: One of my earliest life memories is a skeleton shed on the night sky
in a cornfield in the middle of the summer,
a light bulb dangling and me sitting
and eating this huge ripe watermelon slice.
And then, I very distinctively remember the silhouette of my father
in front of the fire spit-roasting fog swirling around trees in the garden.
I can’t help but thinking
how much of those rituals which were so far beyond the tradition
and were nurtured in celebration
have created who I am today.
So if I were given a choice, would I give up that identity,
all of those memories, would you?
In this day and age, we’re often told that food systems need to change
to save the planet around us, to save us as a species.
But how catastrophic do you think it would be if there was only one system
that was proposed to us, one for all humanity,
erasing and throwing away all those cultural memories across the board?
This is precisely where the notion of food humanism comes into play.
We believe that there is not going to be a leap forward without really embracing
the nature of what food means for humans.
So there is no food humanism in the future
without culture and neuroscience.
And culture and neuroscience is so relevant to this equation,
because it's the very door that is going to be unlocking the memory emotionally,
neurologically, biologically and socially of who we are as humans,
as diverse as we are on all the planet.
And so we believe this is the time to ask the right questions.
A lot of people are not, we’re trying to.
And we would like to really encourage
all of you out there to be asking yourself this question.
How will we keep it human?