tend to intermingle quite a lot and confuse the brain, and taste, as weak as it is, is constantly being influenced by our other senses, the main one being, youâve guessed it, smell. Much of what we taste is derived from the smell of what weâre eating. There have been experiments where subjects, with their noses plugged and wearing blindfolds (to rule out visionâs influence, too), were unable to discern between apples, potatoes and onions if they had to rely on taste alone. 4
A 2007 paper by Malika Auvray and Charles Spence 5 revealed that if something has a powerful smell while weâre eating it the brain tends to interpret that as a taste, rather than an odor, even if itâs the nose relaying the signals. The majorityof the sensations are in the mouth, so the brain overgeneralizes and assumes thatâs where everything is coming from and interprets signals accordingly. But the brain already has to do a lot of the work in generating taste sensations, so it would be churlish to begrudge it making inaccurate assumptions.
The take-home message from all of this is that if youâre a bad cook, you can still get away with dinner parties if your guests are suffering from terrible head colds and willing to sit in the dark.
Come on, feel the noise
(How hearing and touch are actually related)
Hearing and touch are linked at a fundamental level. This is something most people donât know, but think about it; have you ever noticed how incredibly enjoyable it can be to clean out your ear with a cotton swab? Yes? Well, thatâs nothing to do with this, Iâm just establishing the principle. But the truth is, the brain may perceive touch and hearing completely differently, but the mechanisms it uses to perceive them at all have a surprising amount of overlap.
In the previous section, we looked at smell and taste, and how they often overlap. Admittedly, they do often have similar roles regarding recognizing foodstuffs, and can influence each other (smell predominately influencing taste), but the main connection is that smell and taste are both chemical senses. The receptors for taste and smell are triggered in the presence of specific chemical substances, like fruit juice or gummy bears.
By contrast, touch and hearing; what do they have in common?When was the last time you thought something sounded sticky? Or âfeltâ high-pitched? Never, right?
Actually, wrong. Fans of the louder types of music often enjoy it at a very tactile level. Consider the sound systems you get in clubs, cars, concerts and so forth that amplify the bass element of music so much that it makes your fillings rattle. When itâs powerful enough or of a certain pitch, sound often seems to have a very âphysicalâ presence.
Hearing and touch are both classed as mechanical senses, meaning they are activated by pressure or physical force. This might seem weird, given that hearing is clearly based on sound, but sound is actually vibrations in the air that travel to our eardrum and cause it to vibrate in turn. These vibrations are then transmitted to the cochlea, a spiral-shaped fluid-filled structure, and thus sound travels into our heads. The cochlea is quite ingenious, because itâs basically a long, curled-up, fluid-filled tube. Sound travels along it, but the exact layout of the cochlea and the physics of soundwaves mean the frequency of the sound (measured in hertz, Hz) dictates how far along the tube the vibrations travel. Lining this tube is the organ of Corti. Itâs more of a layer than a separate self-contained structure, and the organ itself is covered with hair cells, which arenât actually hairs, but receptors, because sometimes scientists donât think things are confusing enough on their own.
These hair cells detect the vibrations in the cochlea, and fire off signals in response. But the hair cells only in certain parts of the cochlea are activated due to the specific frequencies
A 2007 paper by Malika Auvray and Charles Spence 5 revealed that if something has a powerful smell while weâre eating it the brain tends to interpret that as a taste, rather than an odor, even if itâs the nose relaying the signals. The majorityof the sensations are in the mouth, so the brain overgeneralizes and assumes thatâs where everything is coming from and interprets signals accordingly. But the brain already has to do a lot of the work in generating taste sensations, so it would be churlish to begrudge it making inaccurate assumptions.
The take-home message from all of this is that if youâre a bad cook, you can still get away with dinner parties if your guests are suffering from terrible head colds and willing to sit in the dark.
Come on, feel the noise
(How hearing and touch are actually related)
Hearing and touch are linked at a fundamental level. This is something most people donât know, but think about it; have you ever noticed how incredibly enjoyable it can be to clean out your ear with a cotton swab? Yes? Well, thatâs nothing to do with this, Iâm just establishing the principle. But the truth is, the brain may perceive touch and hearing completely differently, but the mechanisms it uses to perceive them at all have a surprising amount of overlap.
In the previous section, we looked at smell and taste, and how they often overlap. Admittedly, they do often have similar roles regarding recognizing foodstuffs, and can influence each other (smell predominately influencing taste), but the main connection is that smell and taste are both chemical senses. The receptors for taste and smell are triggered in the presence of specific chemical substances, like fruit juice or gummy bears.
By contrast, touch and hearing; what do they have in common?When was the last time you thought something sounded sticky? Or âfeltâ high-pitched? Never, right?
Actually, wrong. Fans of the louder types of music often enjoy it at a very tactile level. Consider the sound systems you get in clubs, cars, concerts and so forth that amplify the bass element of music so much that it makes your fillings rattle. When itâs powerful enough or of a certain pitch, sound often seems to have a very âphysicalâ presence.
Hearing and touch are both classed as mechanical senses, meaning they are activated by pressure or physical force. This might seem weird, given that hearing is clearly based on sound, but sound is actually vibrations in the air that travel to our eardrum and cause it to vibrate in turn. These vibrations are then transmitted to the cochlea, a spiral-shaped fluid-filled structure, and thus sound travels into our heads. The cochlea is quite ingenious, because itâs basically a long, curled-up, fluid-filled tube. Sound travels along it, but the exact layout of the cochlea and the physics of soundwaves mean the frequency of the sound (measured in hertz, Hz) dictates how far along the tube the vibrations travel. Lining this tube is the organ of Corti. Itâs more of a layer than a separate self-contained structure, and the organ itself is covered with hair cells, which arenât actually hairs, but receptors, because sometimes scientists donât think things are confusing enough on their own.
These hair cells detect the vibrations in the cochlea, and fire off signals in response. But the hair cells only in certain parts of the cochlea are activated due to the specific frequencies
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