 Random news from the Archive Noise spoils the taste of food
20.11.2015
Everyone knows that taste and smell are interconnected - an unpleasant smell can spoil the pleasure of even the most delicious food. But it's not just our sense of smell that influences our sense of taste - for example, it's known that dessert tastes better on a white plate than on a black one, and that if we eat in a noisy environment, food will taste less delicious than if we ate in silence. In other words, taste is associated not only with smell, but also with sight and hearing.
Psychologists from Cornell University decided to find out in more detail how exactly extraneous sounds affect our perception of food. In the experiment, volunteers were asked to rate the strength of five basic tastes—bitter, salty, sweet, sour, and umami—on a scale ranging from “taste barely perceptible” to “taste as strong as you can imagine.” Each of them was given in three different concentrations, and each time the test was carried out in two versions: in one case, the person had to try a certain concentration of sweet, salty, etc., as if he was sitting in an airplane, hearing a characteristic broad-spectrum noise with the greatest intensity around 290 Hz and loudness 8-85 dB; in the second case, he was surrounded by ordinary "room" sounds. The noise began 30 minutes before the tasting, so that the participants in the experiment had time to get used to it.
Extraneous sounds did not affect the sensations of salty, bitter and sour. It was different with sweet and umami: aircraft noise suppressed the taste of sweet in any of its concentrations, and stimulated umami - but only when there was so much of it. Obviously, because of this effect, many people do not like airplane food - it lacks sweetness. At the same time, the noise did not affect other sensations (tactile, visual, auditory) and did not affect attention; that is, it could not be said that the changes in taste sensations arose due to the fact that something happened to the person's ability to concentrate.
The physiological explanation for this may be this: the branches of the facial nerve coming from the taste buds pass through the ear, and signals from the eardrum may well affect the taste impulses. True, it is not clear why only two tastes "feel" the influence of noise, and not all five. The researchers note that sweet and umami receptors are particularly susceptible to mutations, so that some people, thanks to certain genetic modifications, apparently can enjoy sweets without paying attention to any noise.
|
Arabic
Bengali
Chinese
English
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Malay
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
All languages of this page