No Accounting for Tastes

PHOTO: Alice Rosen

Okay, it’s clear that scents contribute to our experience of flavor—that’s the reason strong-smelling food is the only kind you can taste when you’re stuffed up—but can flavor contribute to our experience of smell? How weird would that be?

Weird enough to be true, I guess. Brandeis neuroscientists recently had rats sniff and eat a particular kind of food while their taste cortex was knocked out (I love that researchers can just knock shit out like that. I’d like them to knock out my procrastination cortex). Then they reactivated the taste cortex and gave the rats the same food to sniff--but this time the animals didn’t recognize it, and were less likely to eat it. So the scientists knocked out the taste cortex again, and the rats went for the food. In other words, the taste and olfactory systems each seem to contribute a piece of sensory information that is combined in the brain to produce a unique...um...food stamp.

My favorite part of this study is that it relies heavily on rats wanting to sniff each other’s breath--the mechanism the scientists used to introduce the food odors. Seems rats, unlike people, love the whiffs of old lunch their peers produce.