by Gordon M. Shepherd
Columbia University Press, December 2011
Neurogastronomy is an exhaustive treatise on the neural circuitry of flavor. And who better to guide the curious reader through this newly charted territory, in which the sense of smell is paramount, than olfactory scientist and Yale neurobiologist Gordon Shepherd. A renowned olfaction expert, Shepherd has long argued against the notion that our sense of smell has shriveled since evolution stood our ancient ancestors up on two feet and made sight the dominant sense. On the contrary, he argues in Neurogastronomy, smell is still our most important sense as it communicates to our brains sensation of flavor.
The book winds through the nervous system, introducing the emerging science and its physiological epicenter, the “human brain flavor ...
