Raw Sensation / Unmediated Pleasure

Look, bear with me, there will be a point to this.

I studied psychology as an undergraduate degree. Along with a lot of contentious nonsense, a few interesting things stuck with me. One was the phenomenon of being at a party, or in a busy pub, and hearing someone say your name against a chorus of 50 people talking. The implication here is that your brain is unconsciously monitoring everything in the room, and then when something interesting happens - like someone saying your name - your brain shimmers into the room like Jeeves and politely draws your attention to it.

Another thing made an impression on me was seeing a couple of my tutors argue about 'raw sensation'. That's the idea of the moment that brain senses something is going on, but hasn't yet made sense of it. The example that was given was if you touch your finger on something and can't tell if it's really hot or really cold. Your reflexes just go "NO!" before your brain can figure out exactly why it's going "NO!".

All of this was brought back to me recently when I was watching an episode of Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations", where he hangs out with jefe of El Bulli, Ferran Adria. Part of the programme is Bourdain, Adria and couple of others eating their way through the El Bulli tasting menu - a few dozen courses, each just a mouthful or two.

One of the most striking things was the joy that Adria clearly got from eating the food he'd designed. He obviously didn't get to sit down and eat his way through his own menu every day, and to see him have a succession of "HA! WTF?!" moments was beautiful to behold. There's a fairly rudimentary description of this sensation here in paragraph seven, where I have my mind blown in a way that I never have before, and I also touch on it here.

Maybe what made me think about this was Boak and Bailey's flagging of my reaction to a beer. Or maybe it was the pint of Tetley's I had tonight that had a weirdly evocative hint of orange blossom the reminded me of spring in Seville. Or was it the pint of Wadworth's Henry's IPA I had at Christmas that had a faintly stale backnote to it that reminded me of my parents drinks cabinet at Christmas, but when I was ten years old.

Well, I promised a point at the start, so I guess I'd better make one. How much of drinking beer is an intellectual exercise, using the front brain to analyse what's going on, and how much of it is an almost pre-cognitive reaction to what you're drinking? Can we give finely graded 100 point ratings to beers, where we pull it to bits, or is a simple binary yes-no system good enough? And returning to the image in my mind of Ferran Adria rolling his eyes and grinning at his own food, isn't it important to have a visceral reaction to what we drink, as well as a cerebral one?

Properly Proustian - A Brooklyn Flashback

The usefulness of the experiential descriptor "Proustian" rests on the reader knowing that it refers to Marcel Proust's retelling of an experience of smelling and eating tea-soaked madeleine cakes, and the memories that this evoked. It tends to be viewed as a bit pretentious, largely, I think, because it sounds (and indeed is) French, something that the entire non-French world dislikes intensely.

I had an unexpectedly Proustian moment the other evening with a bottle of Brooklyn East India Pale Ale. I was absent-mindedly putting the beer to my lips, and vaguely thinking about having visited the brewery in 2007. Garrett himself showed me round, and coincidentally, EIPA was in one of the kettles that day. As I breathed in, pre-sip, the big burst of floral and toffee aroma snapped me instantly back a couple of decades, to my first ever trip to New York. It was probably 1989, a time when New York was still the sleazy and dangerous city of filmic lore. I was visiting an American guy I had met while he was travelling in the UK. The precise scene evoked by this inhalation of aroma was a party at his apartment on Hoyt Street in Brooklyn. I'd been drinking black and tan for the duration of my visit, and like most Brits abroad, complained loudly about how crappy the beer was. In an attempt to shut me up someone handed me a bottle of the brand new Brooklyn Lager. I wearily, sneerily took the bottle, had a gulp, and was dumbfounded.

It was like the first time I ever tasted whisky. Laphroaig was my malt of choice back then, and what I liked about it was that the flavours were so different, so unfamiliar (and remember, I was only 19) that rather than being dispensed from a bottle, they may as well have been beamed directly onto my cerebral cortex from an alien craft orbiting the planet. That bottle of Brooklyn Lager was the most unexpectedly pungently floral beer I'd ever tried. The way the hops and the slightly toffeeish malt lingered was a revelation. I still moaned about the beer for the rest of my stay - hey, I was an English teenager back then - but I also had a new secret infatuation.

It clearly made a great impression. The beer that evoked those memories wasn't even the same beer, but maybe there was something about the house style, and the concentation of aromas as I breathed in that set off that little memory circuit in my brain. The whole reverie probably lasted for less than a second, before my conscious brain barged in shouting "WHOAH, DUDE! YOU'RE HAVING A PROPERLY PROUSTIAN MOMENT!". Stupid brain.

I've always been sceptical of this sort of thing, largely taking beer-related Proustian experiences with a pinch of salt - sure, I remember drinking this beer on holiday, but that's it. But this was so vivid that, like the bottle of Brooklyn Lager over two decades ago, it almost took my breath away. This wasn't reminiscing over a beer, it was more like a sensory hiccup, a deja vu projected 20 years in the wrong direction. Has anyone else ever had this, or am I special? [NOTE: these are not mutually exclusive]