Originally published August 2 2005
Taste preference may all be in your head
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A new study shows that a person's preference for certain foods might not have anything to do with the foods themselves, but may be the result of certain brain patterns.
In the current issue of Nature Neuroscience, California Institute of Technology neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs and his colleagues at the University of Iowa report on their examinations of a patient whose sense of taste has been severely compromised.
The patient suffered from a herpes brain infection years ago that left him with brain damage.
Today, the patient is unable to name even familiar foods by taste or by smell, and shows remarkably little preference in his choice of food and drink.
According to Adolphs, who is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Caltech, the subject is a 72-year-old man, known as "B," whose brain infection destroyed his amygdala, hippocampus, the nearby temporal cortices, and the insula, and damaged several other brain structures.
As a result, the patient today has a memory span of about 40 seconds, somewhat similar to that of the character in the film Memento.
As a result of his extensive brain damage, B is unable to recognize familiar people and many objects, although his vision and his use of language are unaffected.
"Our likes and dislikes in taste stem from both innate and cultural causes," Adolphs explains.
To test this hypothesis, the researchers set up an experiment in which B, several other subjects with brain damage, and several normal subjects were all offered salty and sweet drinks.
All the subjects drank the sweet drinks and said they enjoyed them, and all with the notable exception of B said they found the saline drink disgusting.
According to Adolphs, taste information "that is meaningless for an isolated individual stimulus can yield relative values when the taste is structured as a comparison."
The paper's coauthors are Daniel Tranel, Michael Koenigs, and Antonio R. Damasio, all of the University of Iowa's Department of Neurology and Neuroscience.
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