How many taste buds you have and their sensitivity to certain chemical compounds also varies from person to person. A 2006 study found that identical twins (which come from the same egg) had more similar tastes between siblings than fraternal twin pairs (two eggs). The first variable is your physiological makeup, which is part genetics. Taste, for most of us, is a three-equation variable, Spackman says.
That means some poor souls will never like coffee-even with cream, sugar and a hefty dose of social pressure. From the moment we're born-and possibly even before-a complex set of cultural, emotional, biological and even genetic factors are working to make some of us think, say, hoppy IPAs are delicious, but tarantula kabobs are not. One thing we do know is that food preferences are highly malleable. To be clear, though, there's still a lot we don't know about our sense of taste, Spackman says. When you come back from vacation, however, your first thought upon opening the front door might be, "Wow, Fido really needs a bath." The same thing happens with foods, especially foods that are highly consistent-which is exactly why we flock to chains like Starbucks. You may not notice the stinky dog funk because your brain sees the smell as normal and ignores it. This frees up space so your brain can think about other stimuli.
In the short term, that means you may be able to move from a salted caramel mocha to a vanilla latte in a matter of days or weeks thanks to a principal called "habituation." The slight bitterness of the coffee-once a turn-off-gradually becomes more and more bearable. "Our brains are constantly taking in info on the things that are all around us," says Christy Spackman, a food studies scientist at Harvey Mudd College in California. "The things that are constant, though, it may stop paying attention to."
0 kommentar(er)
