Linda Bartoshuk on Taste and Pleasure

Linda Bartoshuk on Taste and Pleasure you’re in the hospital, a nurse is going say, “Maybe their hearing is different.” to ask you what your pain is from 1 to Well, we don’t have any reason to think 10. It’s a reasonable scale to find out that hearing is related to taste, and if if your pain gets better if you’re given we are right, on average those with the an analgesic. But does your pain relate most taste buds experience twice the to the person in the bed next to you? sweetness. To be safe, we use loudness No, because you don’t know what 10 as well as many other standards. is to that person. Solving that problem We know a lot about supertasters. led to discoveries like that there are If you’re a supertaster and you taste supertasters, people who taste things table sugar, it’ll be two to three times more intensely than others do. as sweet to you as it is to me because How do you compare taste I am not a supertaster. I’m all the way diferences between people, at the other end. The metaphor I used especially with something like is vision: I taste pastel and supertasters Linda Bartoshuk is an American supertasting where there are taste neon. psychologist who has extensively studied various degrees? how genetic diferences and diseases Does that mean you don’t enjoy We ask them to compare taste to can impact the senses of smell and taste. food as much as supertasters? She is best known for her discoveries on something that isn’t related to taste Well, liking food is a lot more than supertasters. at all. I’ll give you an example. We get a bunch of people together and we biology. Most of it has to do with previous experience and we tend to How did you fnd yourself studying look at their tongues. We can see one like what we previously experienced. I smell and taste? structure of the tongue called fungiform papillae; they’re the larger bumps you don’t wish I were a supertaster because I was studying philosophy and I actually like the world I live in. fascinated with epistemology— can see on your tongue and a structure how do we learn what we know? that houses taste buds. So we pick I love chocolate chip cookies. I can’t I became interested in comparing a group of people who have lots of imagine that I’d love them any more taste sensations from one person to fungiform papillae and we pick another if I were a supertaster, but of course another, which is a really interesting group that have fewer. Then we put I can’t tell because I can’t share that philosophical question. If you think earphones on our subjects and have experience. However, we can use our about it, you and I cannot share them match the sweetness of a soft new methods to compare the pleasure experiences. How can I know what you drink to the loudness of a sound. We people get from things. Chocolate chip experience when you taste something, give them a knob to make the sound cookies probably do give supertasters or feel pain, or any kind of sensation? louder or softer. The people with lots a little more pleasure than they give of taste buds will crank that knob up me if we’re measuring it on a pleasure I think of indicator scales—on a to 90 decibels; the subjects with fewer scale. In general, supertasters get more scale of 1 to 10—or discrimination taste buds will drop it down to 80 pleasure from their favorite foods than tests where you’re given a bunch of decibels. A 10-decibel difference means non-supertasters do. samples and asked to rank them. a doubling of loudness, so we’ve shown Ranking procedures give you some that the people with lots of fungiform Where does pleasure associated information, but they don’t tell you papillae, and thus lots of taste buds, from food come from? what someone else is experiencing. Let match the sweetness of a soft drink to We think it has to be learned. The most me give you an example with pain. If a sound twice as loud. Now you might common belief in the field now is that 86 Cooking for Geeks all odor affect is learned. Sometimes you make the president like your odor?” two different tastes, like sweet from odor is paired with what we consider a The answers get very creative. “Have his sugar and bitter from quinine, they’re primary affect, what we call “hardwired.” girlfriend wear it as a perfume.” “He likes going to suppress each other. So the You’re born loving sugar, so you can baseball games; spray the odor on his rule is whenever you add two different make an odor really liked by pairing it seat when he goes to a game.” “Put it in qualities in taste, they will mutually with sugar. You can also take something the food he likes best.” All of these are suppress each other. If you think about like an odor of meat, the odors of things cases of transfer of affect. You associate it, this may be a very nice mechanism. that are primarily associated with fats. something neutral with something Think about a really complex Chinese The brain wants you to eat fat because that is already liked, and that neutral sauce where you might use vinegar you need the calories. The brain notices stimulus becomes liked. and soy sauce, put a little sugar in, and that the fat that it detects in the of course ginger for a nice flavor. If they stomach came in with a particular odor. Is this why we like certain added linearly, it would blow the top of And it wants you to eat fat, so it makes combinations of favors? your head off. you like that odor better, because that You can look at it from the pleasure Taste, Smell, and Flavor In taste, you get quite powerful mixture odor was paired with something it point of view. For example, if you take suppression, which keeps taste in a wants: fat. And that is the mechanism duck and add orange to it, that’s a reasonable range. Otherwise, every of a conditioned preference. This is why wonderful combination. Raspberry time you had a complex taste, it would experimental psychology has so much with chocolate is another pair that we be much, much more intense, and that to say about why we like certain foods. tend to like. On the other hand, what probably wouldn’t be useful since it’s It’s worked out the system; there are if you added chocolate to duck—that more important in the world to identify rules to it. doesn’t sound terribly interesting—or different objects based on their taste. raspberry to orange? If you think about You don’t really want them to add If you wanted to have someone the pleasure of olfaction and how it is linearly. In olfaction, it’s even worse. take greater pleasure in a food, how acquired, I believe there’s a structure Think about all the different odors you would you do that? to it that we don’t necessarily pay can put together in a mixture. If they Evaluative conditioning studies the attention to. For example, orange is added up linearly, every complicated transfer of affect from one stimulus initially pleasurable because it’s paired mixture would be incredibly intense to another. Olfaction is particularly with sweet. Duck is initially pleasurable and every simple smell would be weak. interesting since we get so much because it’s paired with fat. Orange That isn’t how it works. In olfaction, transfer of affect with smell. You want odor is not innately liked; you learn to you get suppression among the to make somebody like a new dish? like it by pairing it with sweet. And duck components, even more powerfully so Pair the odor of that food with a really odor is not innately liked; you learn to than in taste. pleasant situation, like eating with like it paired with fat. Pairing odors that somebody they really like. Later on, acquired their affect in different ways How we perceive and react to food they’ll like the new dish more because may produce more intense affect. sounds very, very broad. There’s so they first had it with somebody that much more than smell and taste they liked. How does this tie in with in food, which makes it that much combinations of tastes—tastes as more complex. This was an exam question I used in the gustatory sense? to use when I was teaching a food The love of food is an incredibly We know the rules of taste mixture. We behavior course. I’d ask the students, powerful force in our lives. We know a know what happens if you combine “You are a chemist and you’ve just great deal about what makes people sweet, salty, sour, bitter. When you invented a new odor that’s never like food or dislike it. Biology plays a add two things together that have a been on the earth before.” And that’s relatively small role because most of it is common taste, they add. Like sweet possible. “Now, you want your new experience. from saccharin and sweet from sugar; odor to be picked by the president of they’re going to add.

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