My partner is such a good cook, partly because she can combine flavours in her mind, to check if they will taste good together, that is just fucken cheating.

Okay I can do the other stuff (as can most people; you probably have aphantasia) but this? This either is fucking cheating or I have atonguasia

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 26 points 6 days ago

I may be biased since I'm also able to do this (and have gotten pretty good), but I'm reasonably sure it's a skill you can learn. Just take two things, make a prediction how they'd taste together, then try it and see how correct you were. If you keep doing this, you'll eventually be pretty good at predicting new things.

I've done this since I was a child (because it was always interesting to me), so it might take some time, but humans are very good at learning such patterns!

If you want something to start with, take a slice of banana and add mustard. It doesn't taste great (also not terrible), and the flavors mostly stay separate, but they combine a bit in an interesting way.

[–] absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz 13 points 6 days ago

I have multi-sensory aphantasia.

[–] lemmyng@lemmy.ca 11 points 6 days ago

I cannot combine two flavors I've never tasted together in my mind, but I can recall what I did taste before and make an educated guess as to how to reproduce it based on how the individual parts taste. Apart from that it's trial and error - I'd say 65% of the time it works, 25% of the time the result is forgettable, and 1/10 times it's a "what was I thinking??" situation.

[–] Nemo@slrpnk.net 4 points 6 days ago

I don't think I could even do my job without this. I mean, I know not everyone can do it as well as Zi can, but I guess I never thought that there are people that can't do it at all.