I made the orchestra comment to make a point in regards to development-which we all agree is possible in all senses. Your first post re-states everything I just said. I have lost my taste for many ingredient concoctions and cooked food. I have gained a greater sense of taste for the foods we are arguing over-we're not talking about oreo pies or pizzas or pasta, we're talking about fruits, meats, vegetables alone.
And since we want everything empirally proven and double blind tested in this thread, I would love to see your following comment backed up by research:
"The more foods you eat, the more ways you prepare them, the bigger your taste bank grows and the ability to identify them becomes sharper."
I would say the truth is the opposite:the more foods you eat, the more muddled you taste for those foods in isolation gets-in fact, I think this is the very reason most people don't have the sense of taste for certain items that others such as myself-who only eat those items and in isolation-might have.
I'm going to bed, good night.
Read it if you like.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T0P-4G24XJ5-3&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=6cf512aaf1bdafc7d332c8a7d700cbb1Taste, olfactory, and food texture processing in the brain, and the control of food intake
Edmund T. RollsCorresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, E-mail The Corresponding Author
University of Oxford, Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, England, UK
Available online 28 April 2005.
Purchase the full-text article
References and further reading may be available for this article. To view references and further reading you must purchase this article.
Abstract
Complementary neurophysiological recordings in macaques and functional neuroimaging in humans show that the primary taste cortex in the rostral insula and adjoining frontal operculum provides separate and combined representations of the taste, temperature, and texture (including viscosity and fat texture) of food in the mouth independently of hunger and thus of reward value and pleasantness. One synapse on, in the orbitofrontal cortex, these sensory inputs are for some neurons combined by learning with olfactory and visual inputs. Different neurons respond to different combinations, providing a rich representation of the sensory properties of food. In the orbitofrontal cortex, feeding to satiety with one food decreases the responses of these neurons to that food, but not to other foods, showing that sensory-specific satiety is computed in the primate (including human) orbitofrontal cortex. Consistently, activation of parts of the human orbitofrontal cortex correlates with subjective ratings of the pleasantness of the taste and smell of food. Cognitive factors, such as a word label presented with an odour, influence the pleasantness of the odour, and the activation produced by the odour in the orbitofrontal cortex. These findings provide a basis for understanding how what is in the mouth is represented by independent information channels in the brain; how the information from these channels is combined; and how and where the reward and subjective affective value of food is represented and is influenced by satiety signals. Activation of these representations in the orbitofrontal cortex may provide the goal for eating, and understanding them helps to provide a basis for understanding appetite and its disorders.
Keywords: Sensory-specific satiety; Fat; Food texture; Taste; Olfaction; Temperature
Article Outline
1. Introduction
1.1. Taste processing in the primate brain
1.1.1. Pathways
1.1.2. The secondary taste cortex
1.1.3. Five prototypical tastes, including umami
1.1.4. The pleasantness of the taste of food
1.1.5. Sensory-specific satiety
1.2. The representation of flavour: convergence of olfactory and taste inputs
1.3. The rules underlying the formation of olfactory representations in the primate cortex
1.4. The representation of the pleasantness of odour in the brain: olfactory and visual sensory-specific satiety, their representation in the primate orbitofrontal cortex, and the role of sensory-specific satiety in appetite
1.5. The responses of orbitofrontal cortex taste and olfactory neurons to the sight, texture, and temperature of food
1.6. The mouth feel of fat
1.7. Imaging studies in humans
1.7.1. Taste
1.7.2. Odour
1.7.3. Olfactory–taste convergence to represent flavour
1.7.4. Oral viscosity and fat texture
1.8. Cognitive effects on representations of food
1.9. Emotion
2. Conclusions
Acknowledgements
References
Thumbnail image
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the taste and olfactory pathways in primates showing how they converge with each other and with visual pathways. The gate functions shown refer to the finding that the responses of taste neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex and the lateral hypothalamus are modulated by hunger. VPMpc—ventralposteromedial thalamic nucleus; V1, V2, V4—visual cortical areas.
View Within Article
