How you experience something depends largely on your past experience, your expectations and how your senses perceive or are affected by what they interact with. At Mugaritz, we want to know what you are feeling from a neuroscientific, anthropological and sociological point of view.

The Meal Experience was set up in 2015 to provide some insight into the matter. It is a multidisciplinary project involving researchers from the UC3M and Complutense Universities in Madrid, Humboldt University of Berlin, the Jardín de Junio Cognitive Neuroscience Centre in Madrid, the University of Göttingen (Germany) and the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.

A panel of experts designed a methodology for recording what the diners felt in the days prior to the experience, during the dinner and afterwards. Their facial expressions were filmed to see how affected they were by their expectations, whether they were willing or unwilling to try new things, and to identify potential behavioural patterns. A series of articles based on the findings is due for publication in 2017 and 2018.