What happens in your brain when you taste food | Camilla Arndal Andersen (Senses Miniseries #2)

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2:03This is TED Health, a podcast from TED. I'm Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter. I'm a board-certified practicing internal medicine physician, and I'm your host for today's show. I have a confession that will make some people feel very seen, and other people may be a little defensive. I really do not like cilantro. And I wish I did because I really love food. And I love the kind of meal where the table gets crowded, where dishes have layers of flavor. And I love cuisines that are very generous with this little herb. Indian food, Thai food, Mexican food. I just have to make sure that I request no cilantro when I order.

2:45I know the classic line people say is that cilantro tastes like soap. For me, it's not exactly soap. It's more like my body just says no. It turns the whole dish into this sharp, unpleasant flavor, and then I feel a little nauseated. My appetite for this food goes away immediately. And the strange thing is, it runs in my family. My sister has this, my uncle has it, my grandmother had it. At some point, I started wondering, wait, is this one of those family quirks or is there actually something biological going on here? It turns out there may be. Researchers have looked at cilantro aversion and one of the most interesting clues lies in smell, which is strongly tied to our sense of taste.

3:31There's an olfactory receptor gene called OR6A2 that seems to make some people more sensitive to aldehydes, the aromatic compounds in cilantro. Aldehydes are found in some soaps, which is why some people get that soapy impression. Cilantro aversion isn't dangerous. It isn't a diagnosis. But it is useful to recognize that this isn't just pickiness either. It may actually be our brains reading a chemical signal differently than others. And that can fundamentally alter our sensory experience. We often talk about taste as if it's just preference. Like, you like this. I don't like that. You're adventurous.

4:11I'm just being difficult. But taste is more layered than that. It is smell, memory, texture, it's culture, history, and what you grew up eating. It's what your body has learned to trust. And sometimes it may be genes quietly changing the volume on a single ingredient. Today, we're continuing our series on the five senses. Last week, we started with touch. Now we're moving to taste, although taste is already making the case that it doesn't work alone. It turns out taste has a way of exposing how much is happening in our heads, and not just on our tongues. And when someone says they like something, it's unclear whether that's the taste buds talking or the brain, whether the response was there from the start or subconsciously taught.

4:58That's very close to what neuroscientist Camilla Arndahl Anderson studies. In today's TED Talk, she shares her research about how she uses science to bypass what people say they taste and find out what their brains are actually registering. And now, Camilla Arndahl-Anderson.

5:20Camilla Arndal Andersen: So I had this very interesting experience five years ago. You know, me and my husband, we were out grocery shopping as we do every other day. But this time, we found this fancy, you know, I'm talking fair trade. I'm talking organic, I'm talking Kenyan, single-origin coffee that we splurged and got. And that was when the problem started already. You know, my husband, he deemed this coffee blend superior to our regular and much cheaper coffee, which made me imagine a life based solely on fancy coffee. And I saw our household budget explode. And worse, I also feared that this investment would be in vain, that we wouldn't be able to notice this difference after all.

6:12Camilla Arndal Andersen: Unfortunately, especially for my husband, he had momentarily forgotten that he's married to a neuroscientist with speciality in food science. All right? So without further ado, I mean, I just put him to the test. I set up an experiment where I, first I blindfolded my husband, then I brewed the two types of coffee, and I told him that I would serve them to him one at a time. Now, with clear certainty, my husband, he described the first cup of coffee as more raw and bitter, you know, a coffee that would be ideal for the mornings with the sole purpose of terrorizing the body awake by its alarming taste, right?

6:57Camilla Arndal Andersen: The second cup of coffee, on the other hand, was both fruity and delightful. You know, a coffee that one can enjoy in the evening and relax. Little did my husband know, however, that I hadn't actually given him the two types of coffee. I had given him the exact same cup of coffee twice. Right. And obviously, it wasn't this one cup of coffee that had suddenly gone from horrible to fantastic. No, this taste difference was a product of my husband's own mind, of his bias in favor of the fancy coffee that made him experience taste differences that just weren't there. All right, so having saved our household budget and finishing a very good laugh, me especially, I then started wondering just how we could have received two such different responses from a single cup of coffee.

7:55Camilla Arndal Andersen: Why would my husband make such a bold statement at the risk of being publicly mocked for the rest of his life?

8:07The striking answer is that I think you would have done the same. And that's the biggest challenge in my field of science, assessing what's reality behind these answers that we receive.

8:19Camilla Arndal Andersen: Because how are we going to make food tastier if we cannot rely on what people actually say they like? When I drink a cup of coffee, I detect this cup of coffee by receptors on my body, information which is then turned into activated neurons in my brain. Wavelengths of light are converted to colors. Molecules in the liquid are detected by receptors in my mouth and categorized as one of five basic tastes. That's salty, sour, bitter, sweet and umami. Molecules in the air are detected by receptors in my nose and converted to odors. And this is for touch, for temperature, for sound and more. All this information is detected by my receptors and converted into signals between neurons in my brain.

9:11Information which is then woven together and integrated such that my brain recognizes that, yes, I just had a cup of coffee, and yes, I liked it. And only then, after all this neuron-heavy lifting, do we consciously experience this cup of coffee. And this is now where we have a very common misconception. People tend to think that what we experience consciously must then be an absolute true reflection of reality. But as you just heard, there are many stages of neural interpretation in between the physical item and the conscious experience of it,

9:56Camilla Arndal Andersen: which means that sometimes this conscious experience ends up not really reflecting that reality at all, like what happened to my husband. That's because some physical stimuli may just be so weak that they just can't break that barrier to enter our conscious mind, while the information that does may get twisted on its way there by our hidden biases. And people, they have a lot of biases. Yes, if you're sitting there right now thinking, you could probably have done better than my husband. You could probably have assessed those coffees correctly. Then you're actually suffering from a bias. A bias called the bias blind spot.

10:44Our tendency to see ourselves as less biased than other people. And yet we can even be biased about the biases that we're biased about. Not trying to make this any easier. A bias that we know in the food industry is the courtesy bias. This is a bias where we give an opinion which is considered socially acceptable, but it's certainly not our own opinion, right? And I'm challenged by this as a food researcher,

11:15Camilla Arndal Andersen: because when people say they like my new sugar-reduced milkshake, do they now? Or are they saying they like it because they know I'm listening and they want to please me? Or maybe they just want to seem fit and healthy in my ears. I wouldn't know. But worse, they wouldn't even know themselves. Even trained food assessors, and that's people who've been explicitly taught to disentangle the sense of smell and the sense of taste, may still be biased to evaluate products sweeter if they contain vanilla. Why? Well, it's certainly not because vanilla actually tastes sweet. It's because even these professionals are human and have eaten lots of desserts like us and have therefore learned to associate sweetness and vanilla.

12:11So taste and smell and other sensory information is inextricably entangled in our conscious mind. So on one hand, we can actually use this. We can use these conscious experiences, use this data, exploit it by adding vanilla instead of sugar to sweeten our products. But on the other hand, with these conscious evaluations, I still wouldn't know whether people actually like that sugar-reduced milkshake. So how do we get around this problem? How do we actually assess what's reality behind these conscious food evaluations? The key is to remove the barrier of the conscious mind and instead target the information in the brain directly.

12:54And turns out, our brain holds a lot of fascinating secrets. Our brain constantly receives sensory information from our entire body, most of which we don't even become aware of, like the taste information that I constantly receive from my gastrointestinal tract. and my brain will also act on all this sensory information. It will alter my behavior without my knowledge and it can increase the diameter of my pupils if I experience something I really like and increase my sweat production ever so slightly if that emotion was intense. And with brain scans, we can now assess this information in the brain.

13:37Specifically, I've used a brain scanning technique called electroencephalography, or EEG in short, which involves wearing a cap studded with electrodes, 128 in my case. Each electrode then measures the electrical activity of the brain with precision down to the millisecond. The problem is, however, it's not just the brain that's electrically active, it's also the rest of the body as well as the environment that contains a lot of electrical activity all the time. To do my research, I therefore need to minimize all this noise. So I ask my participants to do a number of things here. First off, I ask them to rest their head in a chin rest to avoid too much moss movement.

14:24I also ask them to, meanwhile, stare at the center of a computer monitor to avoid too much eye movements and eye blinks. And I can't even have swallowing. So I ask my participants to stick the tongue out of their mouth over a glass bowl.

14:40Camilla Arndal Andersen: And then I constantly let taste stimuli onto the tongue, which then drip off into this bowl. And then, just to complete this wonderful picture, I also provide my participants with a bib, available in either pink or blue, as they please. And worse, I can't even control what my participants are thinking about. So I need to repeat this taste procedure multiple times. Maybe the first time, they're thinking about the free lunch that I provide for participating. Or maybe the second time, they're thinking about Christmas coming up and what to get for mom this year, you know? But common for each response is the response to the taste.

15:25So I repeat this taste procedure multiple times. 60, in fact. And then I average the responses, because responses unrelated to taste will average out. And using this method, we and other labs have investigated how long time it takes from food lands on our tongue until our brain has figured out which taste it's experiencing. Turns out this occurs within the first already 100 milliseconds. That's about half a second before we even become aware of it. And next up, we also investigated the taste difference between sugar and artificial sweeteners that in our setup taste extremely similar. In fact, it tasted so similar that half my participants could only barely tell the taste apart, while the other half simply couldn't.

16:11But amazingly, if we looked across the entire group of participants, we saw that their brains definitely could tell the taste apart. So with EEG and other brain scanning devices and other physiological measures, sweat and pupil size, we have new gateways to our brain. Gateways that will help us remove the barrier of the conscious mind to see through the biases of people and possibly even capture subconscious taste differences. And that's because we can now measure people's very first response to food before they've become conscious of it and before they've started rationalizing why they like it or not.

16:48We can measure people's facial expressions. We can measure where they're looking. We can measure their sweat response. We can measure their brain response. And with all these measures, we are going to be able to create tastier foods because we can measure whether people actually like that sugar-reduced milkshake. And we can create healthier foods without compromising taste because we can measure the response to different sweeteners and find the sweetener that gives a response that's more similar to the response from sugar. And furthermore, we can just help create healthier foods because we can help understand how we actually sense food in the first place, which we know surprisingly little about.

17:28For example, we know that there are those five basic tastes, but we strongly suspect that there are more. And in fact, using our EG setup, we found evidence that fat, besides being sensed by its texture and smell, is also tasted, meaning that fat could be this new sixth basic taste. And if we figure out how our brain recognizes fat and sugar, and now I'm just dreaming here, but could we then one day create a milkshake with zero calories that tastes just like the real deal? Or maybe we figure out that we can't because we subconsciously detect calories via receptors in our gastrointestinal tract.

18:09The future will show. Our conscious experience of food is just the tip of the iceberg of our total sensation of food. And by studying this total sensation, conscious and subconscious alike, I truly believe that we can make tastier and healthier foods for all. Thank you.

18:37That was Camilla Arndel Anderson at TED at DuPont in 2019. If you liked this episode, check out last week's episode on Touch with Dr. David Eagleman. Next week, we'll forge ahead on our deep dive into the science of the senses. We'll be looking closely at sight. I hope you'll join us. And that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. TED Health is a podcast from TED, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about this episode. Send me a message on Instagram at ShoshanaMD. This episode was produced by me, Shoshana Ungerleiter, and Jess Shane. Edited by Alejandra Salazar and fact-checked by Vanessa Garcia-Woodworth.

19:21Special thanks to Maria Lages, Farah Degrange, Daniela Balarezo, Constanza Gallardo, Tansika Sangmarniwang, and Roxanne Highlash.

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