Hey all,
I am brand spankin new here, only signed up last night but have been reading ecf for the last month since starting vaping. It has been a great resource for me.
One thing i couldn't find, but which i have started doing my own bit of investigating with, is how to get an accurate picture of what a juice actually tastes like. I am certain there are a number of variables that influence what taste i get from the same juice if i experience it on different days/different environments.
I love researching how the brain works, and a short while ago i came across a youtube video discussing optical illusions.
The point that video made was that our visual senses account for about 90 percent of how we navigate this world. They are our primary sense, yet this part of our brain still makes serious mistakes.
What that leads me to is understanding that our senses of smell and taste are much less powerful as a tool to experience the world than our visual sense is. Long story short, our sense of taste and smell aren't razor sharp, but rather soft and bumbly - if our all poweful visual sense makes mistakes, you have to be certain the less powerful taste and smell senses will make even more mistakes.
This is going on too long already, so let me just get things into point form.
Here are some things i am starting to realise.
- Almost any time we taste something in the real world, we have a visual image of what it is we are tasting (eg, an Apple looks like an apple, right?). I think what this does is makes us pre-empt what the flavour is going to be, and causes us to hone in on particular flavours that we know are common of the item in question.
- Trying to taste an item that has no viual representation (i.e ejuice) puts our sense of taste to a greater test than normally found in our everyday life.
- Our sense of smell can often override our initial tasting of something, in the same way that looking at the item we taste does. (if i buy a bunch of juices from the same manufacturer with the same base flavour, the intense smell of the juices together can put me off initially and make me not enjoy them, but later on when that smell is gone i can enjoy the juices.
Here are some other specific things i have experienced.
- One one occasion when first tasting a particular juice i got a 'burnt' flavor: Now this could have been explained by actual burning somewhere in the pv, but in my case i figured out that i had eaten a very sweet biscuit before tasting, and all of the subtle flavouring of the juice was completely masked, leaving me to only experience what i thought was burnt type flavour. On returning to the juice after a while i really enjoy it - like all day vape enjoy it, and don't get a burnt taste from it.
- It took me a while before i was able to taste the above juice properly (i kept getting that burnt type taste for the whole day afterwards). I think what happens here is: if you taste a juice once, the experience stores in your brain, and you almost always go back to that juice subconsciosly looking for that same flavour - so it ends up that you hone in on that same type of flavour you got last time.
- If i pick up a juice knowing what flavour it is, i more often than not taste that flavour straight away (be it a good or bad rendition of that flavour) - but if i find a random cartomizer with no label of flavour on it, i will often get different flavours coming through than when i taste that juice and know what it is - i might end up coming to realise what flavour it is, but will taste it in a completely new and often more positive way from then on.
Anyway, i hope some of that is coherent. My main point is to understand that our taste buds are doing something fairly novel when tasting new ejuice flavours. If i try to come at a new flavour with that in mind, and try to taste it under different sorts of situations before giving it the bin i often get great results. Of course there are 'terrible' flavours out there and that won't change, so don't be too indiscriminate!
Currently i am vaping Dekang 555. RY4, USA MIX, and Red USA mix. On recieving these juices i liked the 555 straight away, but the others i thought were unvapable. Turns out the USA mix is actually the exact same flavour i had been vaping in my much loved prefilled cartomizers, but since i tried it out on a day when i had been tasting heaps of juices (got a delivery that day), to start with i thought it was awful! This was the same juice i had been vaping for a month, but on that first day i could not for the life of me tell it was the same juice!
Ry4 also tasted terrible to me for the first few days, but that could have to do with the fact that when i first got it, i loaded it up into a DCT smoktek and the first pull i took was that flooded cartomizer massive painful throat hit with no vapor that you can sometimes get. After my brain forgot the fact that i got a massive painful throat hit from that juice i could actually tastes it properly and now vape it regularly.
Sorry for the rambling, but this is something i would love to discuss with others. Chances are as we continue vaping we will get better and better at tasting things as not only are we off the real tobacco but we are doing something that is akin to wine tasting everytime we get a new juice. I for one am loving it!
I am brand spankin new here, only signed up last night but have been reading ecf for the last month since starting vaping. It has been a great resource for me.
One thing i couldn't find, but which i have started doing my own bit of investigating with, is how to get an accurate picture of what a juice actually tastes like. I am certain there are a number of variables that influence what taste i get from the same juice if i experience it on different days/different environments.
I love researching how the brain works, and a short while ago i came across a youtube video discussing optical illusions.
The point that video made was that our visual senses account for about 90 percent of how we navigate this world. They are our primary sense, yet this part of our brain still makes serious mistakes.
What that leads me to is understanding that our senses of smell and taste are much less powerful as a tool to experience the world than our visual sense is. Long story short, our sense of taste and smell aren't razor sharp, but rather soft and bumbly - if our all poweful visual sense makes mistakes, you have to be certain the less powerful taste and smell senses will make even more mistakes.
This is going on too long already, so let me just get things into point form.
Here are some things i am starting to realise.
- Almost any time we taste something in the real world, we have a visual image of what it is we are tasting (eg, an Apple looks like an apple, right?). I think what this does is makes us pre-empt what the flavour is going to be, and causes us to hone in on particular flavours that we know are common of the item in question.
- Trying to taste an item that has no viual representation (i.e ejuice) puts our sense of taste to a greater test than normally found in our everyday life.
- Our sense of smell can often override our initial tasting of something, in the same way that looking at the item we taste does. (if i buy a bunch of juices from the same manufacturer with the same base flavour, the intense smell of the juices together can put me off initially and make me not enjoy them, but later on when that smell is gone i can enjoy the juices.
Here are some other specific things i have experienced.
- One one occasion when first tasting a particular juice i got a 'burnt' flavor: Now this could have been explained by actual burning somewhere in the pv, but in my case i figured out that i had eaten a very sweet biscuit before tasting, and all of the subtle flavouring of the juice was completely masked, leaving me to only experience what i thought was burnt type flavour. On returning to the juice after a while i really enjoy it - like all day vape enjoy it, and don't get a burnt taste from it.
- It took me a while before i was able to taste the above juice properly (i kept getting that burnt type taste for the whole day afterwards). I think what happens here is: if you taste a juice once, the experience stores in your brain, and you almost always go back to that juice subconsciosly looking for that same flavour - so it ends up that you hone in on that same type of flavour you got last time.
- If i pick up a juice knowing what flavour it is, i more often than not taste that flavour straight away (be it a good or bad rendition of that flavour) - but if i find a random cartomizer with no label of flavour on it, i will often get different flavours coming through than when i taste that juice and know what it is - i might end up coming to realise what flavour it is, but will taste it in a completely new and often more positive way from then on.
Anyway, i hope some of that is coherent. My main point is to understand that our taste buds are doing something fairly novel when tasting new ejuice flavours. If i try to come at a new flavour with that in mind, and try to taste it under different sorts of situations before giving it the bin i often get great results. Of course there are 'terrible' flavours out there and that won't change, so don't be too indiscriminate!
Currently i am vaping Dekang 555. RY4, USA MIX, and Red USA mix. On recieving these juices i liked the 555 straight away, but the others i thought were unvapable. Turns out the USA mix is actually the exact same flavour i had been vaping in my much loved prefilled cartomizers, but since i tried it out on a day when i had been tasting heaps of juices (got a delivery that day), to start with i thought it was awful! This was the same juice i had been vaping for a month, but on that first day i could not for the life of me tell it was the same juice!
Ry4 also tasted terrible to me for the first few days, but that could have to do with the fact that when i first got it, i loaded it up into a DCT smoktek and the first pull i took was that flooded cartomizer massive painful throat hit with no vapor that you can sometimes get. After my brain forgot the fact that i got a massive painful throat hit from that juice i could actually tastes it properly and now vape it regularly.
Sorry for the rambling, but this is something i would love to discuss with others. Chances are as we continue vaping we will get better and better at tasting things as not only are we off the real tobacco but we are doing something that is akin to wine tasting everytime we get a new juice. I for one am loving it!
