Flavour memories combine and interfere with subsequent aroma detection. For instance, anything with vanilla will taste mildly sweet even if it contains no sugar because we associate vanilla only with sweet dishes. This is a trick one can use to reduce the intake of added sugars.
Adding powdered cardamom to your tea can make it taste sweeter with a relatively smaller amount of sugar. Incidentally, umami can make a smaller amount of sugar linger for longer, so using glutamate-heavy ingredients like walnuts in desserts lets you use lesser sugar
This is also why eggless cakes & ice cream taste cloyingly sweet. Egg yolks, which have a reasonable amount of glutamates let you get away with less sugar.
And just your usual reminder that glutamates exist naturally in several foods, so, that 1 quarter tsp of Ajinomoto will not, as WhatsApp forwards will have you believe, "damage your brain" msgdish.com/glutamate-food… 
And oh, synthetic vanillin (which costs ₹25) is regularly rated by blind taste tasters to be better in cakes than real vanilla essence (which costs an💪🏼 and a🦵🏼). Also, real vanilla requires child labour because only their tiny hands can pollinate that nitpicky orchid.
To close this thread on an appetising note - synthetic vanilla can be made from...cow dung (not surprising since it's usually made from the pyrolysis of lignin in wood) terradaily.com/reports/Japane…
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