Paris, Sept. 11 (AFP): Taste, like beauty, truly is in the brain of the beholder, varying ? sometimes dramatically ? from one person to the next, according to one of the world’s leading sensory neurobiologists.

“No two people will ever smell the same thing in the same way,” says Patrick Mac Leod, chief of the institute of taste and former director of the sensory neurobiology laboratory at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes.

“When we perceive an odour, the exact nature of the sensation that is produced depends as much on the observer as the object,” he said.

Vision, hearing and tactile perception are far more uniform across the species, meaning that human beings see, hear and touch more or less the same things. But when it comes to odours and taste, one man’s wine-of-the-gods can be another’s plonk.

This and other recent findings in sensory neurobiology, says Mac Leod, upend a lot of received wisdom and a fair amount of established science. They also carry profound implications for a host of consumer-oriented industries ranging from food and wine to perfumes and household products.

The search for a taste or odour that will please everyone, if Mac Leod is right, would seem doomed from the start.

The human genome contains 347 olfactory genes ? fully 1 per cent of the total ? while there are only four, for example, for vision. At least half of those genes are polymorphous, meaning “they have a great potential of variation among themselves”, says Mac Leod.