Links for Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)

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For Cancer-Detecting Canines, The Nose Knows

A new clinical trial is set to begin in the United Kingdom using the powerful noses of dogs to detect prostate cancer in humans. While research has been done before, these are the first trials approved by Britain's National Health Service. The trials, at the Milton Keynes University Hospital in Buckinghamshire, will use animals from a nonprofit organization called Medical Detection Dogs, co-founded in 2008 by behavioral psychologist Claire Guest. "What we've now discovered is that lots of diseases and conditions — and cancer included — that they actually have different volatile organic compounds, these smelly compounds, that are associated with them," Guest tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "And dogs can smell them." The dogs offer an inexpensive, non-invasive method to accompany the existing blood tests for prostate cancer, which detect prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, Guest says. "It's a low false-negative but a very high false-positive, meaning that three out of four men that have a raised PSA haven't got cancer," she explains. "So the physician has a very difficult decision to make: Which of the four men does he biopsy? What we want to do is provide an additional test — not a test that stands alone but an additional test that runs alongside the current testing, which a physician can use as part of that patient's picture." The samples come to the dogs — the dogs never go to the patient. At the moment, our dogs would be screening about between a .5- to 1-ml drop of urine [or 1/5 to 1/10 teaspoon], so a very small amount. In the early days, of course, we know whether the samples have come from a patient with cancer or if the patient has another disease or condition, or is in fact healthy. © 2015 NPR

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 21302 - Posted: 08.17.2015

The five basic tastes have sixth sibling: oleogustus

Teresa Shipley Feldhausen Move over, umami. Fat is the newest member of the pantheon of basic tastes, joining salty, sweet, sour, bitter and savory, or umami. Researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., conducted taste tests pitting a variety of fats against flavors in the other taste categories, such as monosodium glutamate for umami. The result: People recognize some fats as separate from the other five taste categories, even with plugged noses. The researchers dub this sixth sense oleogustus. For instance, nearly two-thirds of tasters identified one type of fat — linoleic acid, found in vegetable and nut oils — as a distinct flavor. Texture wasn’t a factor; the researchers whipped up tasting samples that gave the same mouthfeel. Pure oleogustus doesn’t invoke notes of olive oil or fresh butter. It’s unpleasant, the researchers report online July 3 in Chemical Senses. Mix oleogustus with some of the other five flavors, however, and you could end up with doughnuts or potato chips. Citations C.A. Running, B.A. Craig and R.D. Mattes. Oleogustus: The unique taste of fat. Chemical Senses. Published online July 3, 2015. doi: 10.1093/chemse/bjv036. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015.

In Cambodia, Rats Are Being Trained To Sniff Out Land Mines And Save Lives

Michael Sullivan It's 5:45 in the morning, and in a training field outside Siem Reap, home of Angkor Wat, Cambodia's demining rats are already hard at work. Their noses are close to the wet grass, darting from side to side, as they try to detect explosives buried just beneath the ground. Each rat is responsible for clearing a 200-square-meter (239-square-yard) patch of land. Their Cambodian supervisor, Hulsok Heng, says they're good at it. "They are very good," he says. "You see this 200 square meters? They clear in only 30 minutes or 35 minutes. If you compare that to a deminer, maybe two days or three days. The deminer will pick up all the fragmentation, the metal in the ground, but the rat picks up only the smell of TNT. Not fragmentation or metal or a nail or a piece of crap in the ground." That's right: Someone using a metal-detecting machine will take a lot longer to detect a land mine than a rat using its nose. There's plenty of work for the rats here in Cambodia. The government estimates there are 4 million to 6 million land mines or other pieces of unexploded ordnance — including bombs, shells and grenades — littering the countryside, remnants of decades of conflict. Neighboring Vietnam and Laos also have unexploded ordnance left over from the Vietnam War. Dozens of people are killed or maimed in the region every year — and there's a financial toll as well, since the presence of these potentially deadly devices decreases the amount of land available to farmers. © 2015 NPR

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 21246 - Posted: 08.01.2015

Fat Sense: Scientists Show We Have a Distinct Taste for Fat

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON — Move over sweet and salty: Researchers say we have a distinct and basic taste for fat, too. But it's nowhere near as delicious as it sounds. They propose expanding our taste palate to include fat along with sweet, salty, bitter, sour and relative newcomer umami. A research team at Purdue University tested look-alike mixtures with different tastes. More than half of the 28 special tasters could distinguish fatty acids from the other tastes, according to a study published in the journal Chemical Senses. Past research showed fat had a distinct feel in the mouth, but scientists removed texture and smell clues and people could still tell the difference. "The fatty acid part of taste is very unpleasant," study author Richard Mattes, a Purdue nutrition science professor, said Thursday. "I haven't met anybody who likes it alone. You usually get a gag reflex." Stinky cheese has high levels of the fat taste and so does food that goes rancid, Mattes said. Yet we like it because it mixes well and brings out the best of other flavors, just like the bitter in coffee or chocolate, he added. To qualify as a basic taste, a flavor has to have unique chemical signature, have specific receptors in our bodies for the taste, and people have to distinguish it from other tastes. Scientists had found the chemical signature and two specific receptors for fat, but showing that people could distinguish it was the sticky point. Initially Mattes found that people couldn't quite tell fat tastes when given a broad array of flavors. But when just given yucky tastes — bitter, umami, sour — they could find the fat. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 21217 - Posted: 07.25.2015

Cats 'control mice' with chemicals in their urine

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News Cat v mouse: it is probably the most famous predator-prey pairing, enshrined in idioms and a well-known cartoon. And cats, it turns out, even have chemical warfare in their anti-mouse arsenal - contained in their urine. Researchers found that when very young mice were exposed to a chemical in cat urine, they were less likely to avoid the scent of cats later in life. The findings were presented at the Society for Experimental Biology's annual meeting in Prague. The researchers, from the AN Severtov Institute of Ecology and Evolution in Moscow, had previously found that the compound - aptly named felinine - causes pregnant mice to abort. Dr Vera Voznessenskaya explained that mice have a physiological response to this cat-specific compound. Chemical-sensing mouse neurons in the mouse's brain pick up the scent, triggering a reaction which includes an increase in the levels of stress hormones. "It's something that has existed in cats and mice for thousands of years," said Dr Voznessenskaya. This new study revealed that baby mice exposed to the compound during a "critical period" in their development would, as adults, react quite differently to their arch enemy's smell. The team exposed one-month-old mice to the chemical over two weeks. When they were tested later for their reaction, they were much less likely to flee the same scent. The interaction between cats and mice has a long history "Their physical sensitivity [to the chemical] was actually actually much higher," Dr Voznessenskaya explained. "More of their receptors detect the compound and they produce higher levels of stress hormone." Despite this though, mice raised around the unmistakable scent of cat pee are less inclined to show signs of fear, or to flee when they sniff it out. © 2015 BBC.

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 21128 - Posted: 07.04.2015

Seabirds may navigate by scent

by Sarah Zielinski Seabirds called shearwaters manage to navigate across long stretches of open water to islands where the birds breed. It’s not been clear how the birds do this, but there have been some clues. When scientists magnetically disturbed Cory’s shearwaters, the birds still managed to find their way. But when deprived of their sense of smell, the shearwaters had trouble homing in on their final destination. Smell wouldn’t seem to be all that useful out over the ocean, especially with winds and other atmospheric disturbances playing havoc on any scents wafting through the air. But now researchers say they have more evidence that shearwaters are using olfactory cues to navigate. Andrew Reynolds of Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, England, and colleagues make their case June 30 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Messing with Cory’s shearwaters or other seabirds, like researchers did in earlier studies, wasn’t a good option, the researchers say, because there are conservation concerns when it comes to these species. Instead, they attached tiny GPS loggers to 210 shearwaters belonging to three species: Cory’s shearwaters, Scopoli’s shearwaters and Cape Verde shearwaters. But how would the birds’ path reveal how they were navigating? If they were using olfactory cues, the team reasoned, the birds wouldn’t take a straight path to their target. Instead, they would fly straight for a time, guided in that direction by a particular smell. When they lost that scent, their direction would change, until they picked up another scent that could guide them. And only when a bird got close would it use landmarks, other birds and the odor of the breeding colony as guides. If the birds were using some other method of navigation — or randomly searching for where to go — their paths would look much different. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015

Noses Agree When Genes See Eye to Eye

By Christopher Intagliata Two decades ago, Swiss researchers had women smell the tee shirts that various men had slept in for two nights. Turned out that if women liked the aroma of a particular shirt, the guy who’d worn it was likely to have genetically coded immunity that was unlike the woman’s. Well the effect isn't just limited to sweaty shirts. Turns out we all smell things a little differently—you pick up a note of cloves, say, where I smell something more soapy—and that too gives clues to our degree of genetic similarity. Researchers tried that test with 89 people—having them sniff a couple dozen samples, and label each one using terms like lemony, coconut, fishy and floral. And each volunteer classified the scents differently enough that the researchers could single them out in subsequent tests, based on what they called each subject’s "olfactory fingerprint." Researchers then repeated that sniff test on another 130 subjects. But this time they did a blood test, too, to figure out each person's HLA type—an immune factor that determines whether you'll reject someone's organ, for example. They found that people who perceived smells similarly also had similar HLA types. Study author Lavi Secundo, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, says the smell test could have real-world applications. "For organ donation you can think of this method as a quick, maybe a quick and dirty, method to sift between the best and the rest." He and his colleagues say it might even eliminate the need for 30 percent of the HLA tests done today. The work appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Lavi Secundo et al, Individual olfactory perception reveals meaningful nonolfactory genetic information] © 2015 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 21112 - Posted: 06.30.2015

Sense of smell is strictly personal, study suggests

Sarah Schwartz A person’s sense of smell may reveal a lot about his or her identity. A new test can distinguish individuals based upon their perception of odors, possibly reflecting a person’s genetic makeup, scientists report online June 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Most humans perceive a given odor similarly. But the genes for the molecular machinery that humans use to detect scents are about 30 percent different in any two people, says neuroscientist Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. This variation means that nearly every person’s sense of smell is subtly different. Nobody had ever developed a way to test this sensory uniqueness, Sobel says. Sobel and his colleagues designed a sensitive scent test they call the “olfactory fingerprint.” In an experiment, test subjects rated how strongly 28 odors such as clove or compost matched 54 adjectives such as “nutty” or “pleasant.” An olfactory fingerprint describes individuals’ perceptions of odors’ similarities, not potentially subjective scent descriptions. All 89 subjects in the study had distinct olfactory fingerprints. The researchers calculated that just seven odors and 11 descriptors could have identified each individual in the group. With 34 odors, 35 descriptors, and around five hours of testing per person, the scientists estimate they could individually identify about 7 billion different people, roughly the entire human population. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015.

Mouse Noses Can Bypass the Brain to Make Females Blind to Males

By Brian Handwerk When it comes to mating, female mice must follow their noses. For the first time, scientists have shown that hormones in mice hijack smell receptors in the nose to drive behavior, while leaving the brain completely out of the loop. According to the study, appearing this week in Cell, female mice can smell attractant male pheromones during their reproductive periods. But during periods of diestrus, when the animals are unable to reproduce, the hormone progesterone prompts nasal sensory cells to block male pheromone signals so that they don't reach a female's brain. During this time, female mice display indifference or even hostility toward males. The same sensors functioned normally with regard to other smells, like cat urine, showing they are selective for male pheromones. When ovulation begins, progesterone levels drop, enabling the females to once more smell male pheromones. In short, the system "blinds" female mice to potential mates when the animals are not in estrus. The finding that the olfactory system usurped the brain's role shocked the research team, says lead author Lisa Stowers of the Scripps Research Institute. “The sensory systems are just supposed to sort of suck up everything they can in the environment and pass it all on to the brain. The result just seems wacky to us,” Stowers says. “Imagine this occurring in your visual system," she adds. "If you just ate a big hamburger and then saw a buffet, you might see things like the table and some people and maybe some fruit—but you simply wouldn't see the hamburgers anymore. That's kind of what happens here. Based on this female's internal-state change, she's missing an entire subset of the cues being passed on to her brain.”

Is my cat bitter, or does he just taste that way?

By Emily DeMarco For owners of picky cats, that disdainful sniff—signaling the refusal of yet another Friskies flavor—can be soul-crushing. Some cats are notoriously finicky eaters, but the reasons behind such fussy behavior remain fuzzy. Previous research has shown that cats can’t taste sweet flavors, but little is known about how they perceive bitter tastes. Now, researchers in the pet food industry have identified two bitter taste receptors in domestic cats, which could help explain why some felines are so choosy when it comes to their chow. In the study, published today in BMC Neuroscience, the scientists used cell-based experiments to see how the two cat taste receptors, known as Tas2r38 and Tas2r43, responded to bitter compounds such as phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) and 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP)—which have molecular structures similar to ones in Brussels sprouts and broccoli—as well as aloin (from the aloe plant) and denatonium (used to prevent inadvertent ingestion of some chemicals). When compared with the human versions of these receptors, the researchers found that the cat bitter receptor Tas2r38 was less sensitive to PTC and did not respond to PROP, whereas Tas2r43 was less sensitive to aloin but more sensitive to denatonium, leading the researchers to conclude that cats taste different, and perhaps more narrow, ranges of bitter flavors than humans. The research could help pharmaceutical and pet food manufacturers create compounds that block or inhibit these bitter taste receptors, the team says, potentially leading to more appetizing medicines (if such a thing exists) and foods for our feline companions. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science

What Happens When You Taste Wasabi and Sriracha?

By Paca Thomas Wasabi and Sriracha each activate different receptors on the tongue, both of which warn your brain of the atomic reaction to come. These key flavor receptors, TRPA1 and TRPV1, have been the subject of recent research—but why all the scientific study of hot and spicy condiments? One word: pain. The video above explains how our tongues react to heat in our food, and how that often triggers the body’s own bespoke painkiller.

Why illness might leave a bitter taste in the mouth

Nala Rogers People who are ill often complain of changes in their sense of taste. Now, researchers report that this sensory shift may be caused by a protein that triggers inflammation. Mice that cannot produce the protein, called tumour necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), are less sensitive to bitter flavours than normal mice, according to a study published on 21 April in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity1. People with infections, autoimmune disease or other inflammatory conditions have higher levels of TNF-α than healthy people, and the protein has been shown to reduce food intake2. To investigate the influence of TNF-α on taste, researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, used engineered mice that could not produce the protein. The researchers offered the engineered mice and normal mice water that contained different types and concentrations of flavours. The mice that could not produce TNF-α had normal reactions to sweet, sour, salty and umami flavours, but were less sensitive to bitter ones. “Normal mice will pick up [that taste] at a much lower concentration. They will know this is bitter; they will not like it,” says Hong Wang, a molecular biologist at Monell and an author of the study. “But if the TNF-α gene is not there, then the mice will only start to avoid the bitter solution at higher concentrations.” © 2015 Nature Publishing Group

The Joy of Scents

By Rachel E. Gross “By being a guy’s best first move … Axe is designed to keep guys a step ahead in the dating game,” boasts Unilever, the company that sells Axe products. Of course, if you don’t happen to be a gullible 13-year-old boy, you probably don’t believe that body spray or deodorant is a magic elixir with the power to turn nice girls naughty. But what if it were possible to change a person’s mood with just a scent? The idea may not be that far-fetched, according to a new study in the journal Psychological Science—reporting work that was funded by Unilever. The study found that it might be possible to subconsciously trigger a state of happiness using the scent of—deep breath now—human sweat. People send all kinds of secret messages through their secretions. When smelling chemicals in male sweat, women become more alert, and they can even tell whether that sweat was made by a guy who was particularly turned on. (Cautions the New York Times: “No man should imagine that based on these conclusions he can improve his sex life by refraining from bathing.”) But until now, most sweat studies have focused on sexual arousal or negative emotions like fear. For obvious reasons, these emotions are crucial to survival and evolutionary success. If your friend spots a puma, it may be helpful for you to be able to sniff out instant cues to be on the alert or flee for cover. Being able to transmit positive emotions may also have a profound social impact, says Gün Semin, a psychologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and lead researcher on the study. After all, “the pursuit of happiness is not an individual enterprise,” as he and his fellow researchers write rather eloquently in the new study. So Semin’s team decided to test whether people could communicate happiness via sweat.

Frankie the dog 'sniffs out thyroid cancer'

By James Gallagher Health editor, BBC News website, San Diego A dog has been used to sniff out thyroid cancer in people who had not yet been diagnosed, US researchers say. Tests on 34 patients showed an 88% success rate in finding tumours. The team, presenting their findings at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society, said the animal had an "unbelievable" sense of smell. Cancer Research UK said using dogs would be impractical, but discovering the chemicals the dogs can smell could lead to new tests. The thyroid is a gland in the neck that produces hormones to regulate metabolism. Thyroid tumours are relatively rare and are normally diagnosed by testing hormone levels in the blood and by using a needle to extract cells for testing. Cancers are defective, out-of-control cells. They have their own unique chemistry and release "volatile organic compounds" into the body. The canine approach relies on dogs having 10 times the number of smell receptors as people and being able to pick out the unique smells being released by cancers. The man's best friend approach has already produced promising results in patients with bowel and lung cancers. A team at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) had previously showed that a dog could be trained to smell the difference between urine samples of patients with and without thyroid cancer. Frankie the dog Frankie gave the correct diagnosis in 30 out of 34 cases The next step was to see if it could be used as a diagnostic test. Frankie the German Shepherd was trained to lie down when he could smell thyroid cancer in a sample and turn away if the urine was clean.

Sexing up the human pheromone story: How a corporation started a scientific myth

Tristram Wyatt This Valentine’s Day, like every year, there was a rash of stories in the news about sexy smells and pheromones. You could be forgiven for thinking that human ‘sex pheromones’, in particular the ‘male molecule’ androstadienone, were well established: countless ‘human pheromones’ websites sell it and there are tens of apparently scientific studies on androstadienone published in science journals. These studies are cited hundreds of times and have ended up being treated as fact in books on sexual medicine and even commentary on legislation. The birth place of the pheromone myth was a 1991 conference in Paris sponsored by a US corporation, EROX, which had an interest in patenting androstadienone and another molecule - estratetraenol, from women - as ‘human pheromones’. Unwittingly, leading mammalian olfaction scientists lent the conference credibility. Slotted into the programme and conference proceedings was the short ‘study-zero’ paper on the ‘Effect of putative pheromones on the electrical activity of the human vomeronasal organ and olfactory epithelium’. To my surprise, the authors gave no details at all of how these molecules had been extracted, identified, and tested in bioassays - all routinely required steps in the exhaustive process before any molecule can be shown to be a species-wide chemical signal, a pheromone. Instead there was just a footnote: ‘These putative pheromones were supplied by EROX Corporation’. The missing, essential details were never published. (The claim by EROX-sponsored scientists that adult humans have a functioning vomeronasal organ, against all the evidence, is a story for another day). © 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

After handshakes, we sniff people's scent on our hand

by Catherine de Lange You won't believe you do it, but you do. After shaking hands with someone, you'll lift your hands to your face and take a deep sniff. This newly discovered behaviour – revealed by covert filming – suggests that much like other mammals, humans use bodily smells to convey information. We know that women's tears transmit chemosensory signals - their scent lowers testosterone levels and dampens arousal in men - and that human sweat can transmit fear. But unlike other mammals, humans don't tend to go around sniffing each other. Wondering how these kinds of signals might be exchanged, Noam Sobel and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel turned to one of the most common ways in which people touch each other - shaking hands. "We started looking at people and noticed that afterwards, the hand somehow inadvertently reached the face," says Sobel. To find out if people really were smelling their hands, as opposed to scratching their nose, for example, his team surreptitiously filmed 153 volunteers. Some were wired up to a variety of physiological instruments so that airflow to the nose could be measured without them realising this was the intention. The volunteers were filmed as they greeted a member of the team, either with or without a handshake. The researchers recorded how often the volunteers lifted their hands close to their nose, and how long they kept them there, the minute before and after the greeting. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Pregnancy Odor Reveals Unborn Baby's Sex

// by Jennifer Viegas It’s long been suspected that males of many species, including humans, can sniff out whether a female is pregnant, and now new research suggests that some — if not all — female primates release a natural “pregnancy perfume” that males can probably detect. What’s more, such scents appear to broadcast whether the mom-to-be is carrying a boy or a girl. The study, published in the journal Biology Letters, focused on lemurs as a model for primates. It presents the first direct evidence in any animal species that a pregnant mother’s scent differs depending on the sex of her baby. The scent signatures “may help guide social interactions, potentially promoting mother–infant recognition, reducing intragroup conflict” or sort out paternity, wrote authors Jeremy Crawford and Christine Drea. The latter presents a loaded scenario, as it could be that males can sense — even before the birth — whether they fathered the baby. The researchers additionally suspect that odors advertising fetal sex may help dads and moms prepare for what’s to come. Crawford, from the University of California, Berkeley, and Drea, from Duke University, used cotton swabs to collect scent secretions from the genital regions of 12 female ringtailed lemurs at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, N.C., before and during pregnancy. The scientists next used chemical analysis to identify the hundreds of ingredients that make up each female’s scent change during pregnancy. A surprising finding from this is that expectant lemur moms give off simpler scents that contain fewer odor compounds compared with their pre-pregnancy bouquet. The change is more pronounced when the moms are carrying boys, Drea said. © 2015 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Salty, Sweet, Sour. Is It Time To Make Fat The Sixth Taste?

Maanvi Singh Your tongue doubtless knows the difference between a high-fat food and the low-fat alternative. Full-fat ice cream and cream cheese feel silkier and more sumptuous. Burgers made with fatty meat are typically juicer than burgers made with lean meat. OK, so, we've long known fat gives food a desirable texture. But some scientists are now making the case that we should also think of fat as the sixth primary taste, along with sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami. Early in February, researchers from Deakin University in Australia published a paper in the journal Flavour arguing that "the next 5 to 10 years should reveal, conclusively, whether fat can be classified as the sixth taste." So what would it take for fat to become an official taste? "Strictly speaking, taste is a chemical function," Russell Keast, a sensory scientist at Deakin and lead author of the paper, tells The Salt. He says that when a chemical substance – a salt or sugar crystal, for example — comes into contact with sensory cells in our mouths, it triggers a series of reactions. The cells in our mouths tell other nerve cells that they're perceiving something sweet or salty and those nerve cells eventually pass this information on to the brain. According to the paper, there are five criteria that need to be met to call something a primary taste. It starts with a chemical stimuli (like sugar or salt), which then trigger specific receptors on our taste buds. Then, there has to be a viable a pathway between these receptors and our brains, and we've got to be able to perceive and process the taste in the brain. And finally, this whole process has to trigger downstream effects in the body. © 2015 NPR

Decoding sommeliers’ brains, one squirt of wine at a time

By Tina Hesman Saey Gustometer guhs-TOH-meh-ter n. A device used to squirt measured amounts of liquids into the mouth of a person in a taste study. Researchers often pair the instrument with brain scanning technology. Recently, a study of wine tasting pitted 10 of the top sommeliers from France and Switzerland against 10 novices. Researchers led by Lionel Pazart of Besançon University Hospital in France custom-built a gustometer to conduct the blind taste test. The scientists compared how brain activity changed when people tasted chardonnay, pinot noir or water. When sipping wine, the experts had greater activity in several parts of their brains, including regions involved in memory, than novices did, the researchers report in October in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. Sommeliers’ expertise may allow them to process sensory input about a wine — its taste and bouquet — while simultaneously recalling other information, such as the reputation of the winery that produced the beverage. Citations L. Pazart et al. An fMRI study on the influence of sommeliers’ expertise on the integration of flavor. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience Vol. 8, October 16, 2014. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00358. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015.

How the Sense of Taste has Shaped Who We Are

|By Gareth Cook What is flavor? Beginning with this simple question, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist John McQuaid weaves a fascinating story with a beginning some half a billion years ago. In his new book, Tasty, McQuaid argues that the sense of taste has played a central role in the evolution of humans. McQuaid’s tale is about science, but also about culture, history and, one senses, our future. What made you decide to write a book about taste? I have two kids, a boy and a girl born two years apart – now teens – and a few years ago, I became fascinated with how their tastes and preferences in food differed. My son liked extremes, especially super-hot chili peppers and whole lemons and limes. My daughter hated that stuff. She preferred bland comfort foods such as mashed potatoes, pasta, cheese and rice. White foods. Both kids were also picky eaters. They liked what they liked, and it didn’t overlap (except for pizza). Speaking as a parent, this was maddening. So I wondered where these differences came from. Were they genetic? The kids had mostly the same genes. Environment? They lived in the same place. And yet clearly both genes and environment were in play somehow. So I began to look into the question, and a whole world opened up. And the basic answer to my original question is: kids are, biologically speaking, weird creatures. Pickiness seems to be programmed by evolution: it would have protected small children from eating strange, possibly poisonous items. Certain preferences, meanwhile, can develop arbitrarily and become very strong, then suddenly fade – every kid goes through phases as the brain matures and the neural networks that shape perception and behavior grow. Each person’s sense of flavor is like a snowflake or a fingerprint, in this way, shaped by partly by genes, but largely by experience. And always changing as more meals are eaten. © 2015 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN8e: Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 20481 - Posted: 01.14.2015

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