Suggestion works on taste buds too. In the nineties I had a thing for salsa and ate it most days at the office over things I steamed in the microwave. But I ate the mild salsas and couldn't tolerate the hot stuff. Still can't.
So my boss decides to spice it up a bit, and mixes in some hot salsa. I didn't notice. Each day he gradually added more until it was all the hot stuff. I didn't notice. He went out and bought hotter stuff. For some reason the whole office was watching me when I made some quiet comment about the mild salsa being hotter than it used to be. They thought that was pretty funny.
But I really didn't notice. If you can lie to the tongue, why not the liver?
You build up tolerance to hot stuff pretty quickly (and lose it pretty quickly). And most commonly-available salsas (even labeled "hot") top out at not-actually-very-hot. If your boss was only gradually adding more and more of the hot stuff, I absolutely believe that he could have just built up your tolerance such that you didn't notice; regardless of suggestion.
When I say "commonly-available", I mean "big national brands that you can find in a supermarket anywhere in the country". With less common/local brands, yeah, some are actually quite hot.
Gordon Ramsay did some food shows in India. In one of them there is a hot pepper eating contest. He tests and bows out. A woman won by eating the most in a given time (maybe a minute), she beat the other contestants but not the record; so to up it, she rubbed the peppers into her eyes to win a bonus prize. WTF!! The audience seemed to “appreciate” it.
Apparently there is a gene for pain sensitivity, this Norwegian talk show[1] hosts [2] got their tested and their sidekick has a higher tolerance for pain. They tested this by putting their hands above some tea lights from 9:30 onwards.
I looked it up and can’t find anything that claims what you do that a pepper can blind you. I did find one article that said it can not after one exposure but possibly long term exposure could it just wasn’t tested. Do you have any sources on that claim? Thank you. I ask because we used to prank with peppers when I was young never worried about blinding someone though it was good if they rubbed their eyes or took a pee with ghost hands.
>If that's considered safe enough to be used by police
I mean, there has been some discussion over the last few years that police don't actually have as good a safety record as one might hope when doing things that could involve pepper spraying, or hitting, or tazing, or otherwise subduing people.
This is true of the US, but pepper spray is also used by police forces in many other countries around the world where the police have a much better track record.
I despise the trend of having "hot" mean "mild", "very hot" mean "mildly hot", etc. Possibly the most ridiculous is Sabra hummus where the Supremely Spicy flavor is less spicy than the jalapeño flavor. Hats off to Cheetos for having possibly the most mainstream product of all but still managing to put actual heat in their "Exxxtra Flamin' Hot" version.
At least in NYC most immigrant establishments will serve you "white people hot" if you don't ask for "regular hot". Saying this as a white Polish, it took me a while after moving there to realize that I was being served a "white people hot" hot, and also that apparently Poles love their food way hotter than other (most?) European nations. That's even more interesting if you consider our otherwise fairly bland national cuisine. It's rather unusual for a Pole to avoid spicy food at all – if someone does, it is a notable exception.
Once I learned it, I would place my orders saying:
"– Yes, hot please. Your hot, not mine."
As for spicy snacks, nothing can beat Takis Fuego! :)
But is there a biological mechanism for "building up a tolerance"? Seems possible that building up a tolerance is merely a mental exercise as well. Perhaps in the subconscious part of the brain at least.
Yup! There’s a neurotransmitter for registering the compounds that trigger that hot sensation, and that neurotransmitter gets depleted over time, based on exposure. I don’t know the exact timeframes, but it’s on the order of days/weeks.
Is it something similar for temperature? In my country some people go swimming all year around - even when the lake is covered in ice (they cut a hole). They say if you go everyday from summer to winter, you don't notice the temperature change and it's not such a big deal.
I’m not aware of anything like Substance P for temperature sensation. If I had to guess, it sounds more physiological— circulatory system adaption to handle colds exposures (e.g. blood vessel diameter). Maybe someone else here knows more and we can both learn!
Good question, one that I don't know the answer to. But I know an experiment that can help us find out! Spicy-hot is a complex phenomenon, but it is my understanding that a large part of it is that the capsaicinoids react with the heat receptors in your mouth to adjust their baseline temperature; making them react to normal temperatures inside your mouth as if they were physically burning hot. If tolerance is a purely mental exercise, then I would expect that I would not be able to accurately judge temperature of things in my mouth after consuming very spicy food; if I can accurately judge temperature then this would suggest that there is a biological mechanism at play.
I eat very spicy food and I've noticed for a while now I've lost the ability to detect when I'm being burned in my mouth (at all, it's actually a bit of an issue sometimes). The rest of my body is the same as it always was - save for my fingers, which I can use to flip things in hot oil (probably a result of exposure to hot oil). Perhaps you are on to something :)
A farmer carried a baby bull calf across his field every day. As each day passed, the calf grew a little more and became slightly heavier. Just a little bit more weight each day.
By the time the calf had become a bull, the farmer was so strong he could carry a bull the length of his field while talking on his cell phone.
Your story "proves" all the studies with sommeliers where they duped them into rating white wines (with red food coloring) as fancy red wines. All the sommeliers failed the blind tests. In fact all those studies showed was that the taste of wine stemmed primarily from the perception of the bottle rather than the actual taste.
Might want to refresh your reading on this. AFAIK this is reference to one (unpublished) study where undergrad wine science students tended to choose from a list of descriptive terms usually associated with red wine to refer to dyed white wine, most of the time.
It's certainly true that suggestion can change ones perception of wine (or any flavor), but I don't think it's clear that it's the primary factor.
Yes, this is correct —- it’s actually a fascinating study, but the translation from French was done poorly and then the English-speaking media ran with the clickbait version.
The original study finds that the terms we use for flavor (partly) encode the tuple of flavor and color. That is, given two identical smelling / tasting liquids, subjects will pick different vocabulary to describe the flavor when the liquid is red vs clear.
There's evidence that wine judging is less objective than most people involved in it seem to believe. I'm not sure that justifies calling it nonsense, or misrepresenting a study as showing that experienced people can't even distinguish white from red.
It does actually, but that wasn't really my point in referring to it. More that the GP post misrepresenting the study isn't justified by other evidence of a lack of rigour in the field.
Why should red and white wines taste so distinguishably different anyway? Because one is red colored and one is white? So what? Seems like your contempt here falls prey to the same biases as the sommeliers.
Of course, you're not supposed to be an expert. But still, seems like a hypocritical thing to make fun of someone else for.
Because there is a fundamental difference in how they're made: red wines spend more time in contact with grape skins, while white wines don't. Grape skins contain tannins and other compounds that end up in the wine, and humans can perceive these compounds. You might question whether there is enough difference to warrant the perceived difference in flavor, but there are definitely quantitatively measurable differences in composition of typical red and white wines that would lead you to posit that they would taste different.
I'm not saying they're literally the same. There are also invisible differences between any two wines that have MUCH MORE impact on the taste profile. Red and white can even be the same grape. Are the skins really more impactful than, for example, the type of grape, how the wine was aged, or for how long?
Why is the color so important? Mostly because it's visible to us noobs.
>Because one is red colored and one is white? So what?
So what depends on why things are different colors. For instance, red velvet cake is just vanilla cake dyed red with food coloring. In that case, there wouldn’t be a difference in taste. On the other end, vanilla bean ice cream has black specks distributed throughout from the contents of the vanilla bean itself. If you substituted black pepper, it might look the same but it would not taste the same. As Niksko explained, red and white wine are different due to differences in ingredients and different processes which impart different flavor and color.
Yeah, I'm aware of that. See my other comment. I don't know enough to say whether the impact on flavor is proportionate to the impact on color. I'd like to say I'm wise enough to realize that the dramatic change in color is very likely to be more impactful, or at least allow for the possibility.
Paper is from 2016. Huberman Labs has a great roundup (Nov '21) of the research on time perception - and several other related series on dopamine. The title of OP was not surprising after listening. https://hubermanlab.com/time-perception-and-entrainment-by-d...
I thought of this when reading the heading. I remember hearing ages ago that artificial sweeteners can kick someone out of ketosis sometimes and this podcast gave a good explanation of it.
The idea is a bit too revolutionary to be fully understood by current generation.
It breaks hadware/software model of living organisms. The implications might be so huge, no one today can imagine them.
We really need to teach those things in school now, so that our children do not reject them reflexively as voodoo and unscientific.
I think people like to think of the brain/mind as a black hole/sink of the bodily processes and organs, but it has profound influence over them. Most obviously, there is fight or flight. But it's more subtle than that. The brain can influence inflammation in other parts of the body, which I can't back up right now, since it's just something I read in a science magazine a few years ago. Although here's something related about how the vagus nerve interacts with inflammation and metabolism:
Emotionally relevent hormones, the most obvious of which is cortisol, influence all kinds of bodily processes like hunger, metabolism, energy, etc. And one interesting one I can think of in my own life is bladder activity - ever notice how, if you're on a long trip, you can hold in your pee without even thinking about it, but as soon as you get home and head towards the bathroom, it's like your bladder is about to explode? Or how you can still get up and pee even if it doesn't feel like you need to?
And I think many of us have probably had the experience where we got so wrapped up in an interesting and challenging task that we forgot to become hungry, and maybe even missed our opportunity to be hungry until the next day.
The article is worth skimming, or at least the abstract
They didn't rely on the participants' subjective perception of time passing, but manipulated it through means that can't possibly be downstream of the subjects' blood sugar.
> Participants’ perception of time was manipulated by having them refer to clocks that were either accurate or altered to run fast or slow
This makes sense. To be clear, perceived time is not directly affecting blood glucose, it is affecting speeds of digestive breakdown and/or insulin secretion rates (most type-2s still secrete insulin). Interesting that this study was even run on diabetics at all (as opposed to euglycemic people) - not sure what the utility is there besides them being familiar with continuous glucose monitors.
>Participants were instructed to record their BGLs before and after every meal and to complete a daily blood glucose change chart for a week before the experiment.
For one, I imagine getting a group of people with no history of monitoring their blood glucose to accurately track it over a week would be tricky.
> Another potential confounding factor concerns the imbalanced number of times each group switched video games. Participants switched games every 15 min, according to the clocks they were given, so participants in the fast clock group switched more frequently than participants in other groups. One might propose that the increased switching in the fast clock group might have led to greater activity and exertion, causing blood glucose to decline more rapidly. The switching process entailed loading up a different video game on a computer, which is not a particularly demanding task. Even so, we controlled for this, to a degree, by instructing participants to alert the experimenters when it was time to change games, at which point the experimenters performed the actual switching. No actual effort was required of participants to make the change, aside from alerting the experimenter. It seems implausible that the effort required to signal the experimenter at switching times could have played a significant role in the intergroup differences observed.
They did not switch every 15 minutes! They switched every 15 fake minutes, ie. every 7 minutes in the fast group and every 30 minutes in the slow group. The paper waves this away, but I suspect that getting used to a new game takes more energy than they realize.
A way to test this would be by varying the time that the last game is played, in order to measure blood sugar change during beginning or end of a play phase. If this is correct, consumption should be bigger at the start and lesser at the end of each phase, regardless of how long it actually is.
The study suggests the context switching shouldnt have had much effect as the control group (who switched 6 times) had BGL decrease consistent with normal rest (so by extension those who switched only 3 times must have had lower than normal rates of BGL decrease at rest over the real life 90 minutes, which is potentially the most interesting part of the correlation they found)
They also claim no effect on subjective reported stress level (but those who switched more times did report more stress, just not to a statistically significant degree...)
Although the games were reportedly "easy" I do think it'd be interesting to see whether there were any meaningful differences in the approaches to the game and levels of performance of the different cohorts. And if they performed similarly but those on a slower "subjective timescale" received vastly more "reward" indicators like higher scores, "you wins" or proportions of a grid/map ticked off because they played each game for longer, that would also be a confounding factor
This seems to indicate that studies should be designed to investigate the effectiveness of diets with respect to expectations and future plans; since the system is complex and literally based on the subject's memories and expectations of future events.
With surgeries on the eye the patient selection criteria extends well beyond the measurable aspects of their vision.
Instead the criteria is highly dependent on the patient's expectations and second to that that their willingness to work with the vision they receive. Notwithstanding physical limitations it's this difference in attitude which results in real world, measurable, improvements in the patient's visual acuity.
Outside of the op space, a similar-ish issue exists with multifocal glasses (and contact lenses) - these technologies work, but how well they work is highly dependent on the patient's expectations.
I’m inclined to believe this is an inaccurate study. I’d really like to see it replicated.
That said, assuming it’s accurate — that’s kind of an amazing physiological response to perceived time. I wonder if other systems can be impacted or what would cause this particular system to be impacted? I could see people’s metabolism changing based on perception(s).
So many questions, but an exciting and interesting area.
I feel like it's one of these studies where there is deep importance not to read more into the conclusion than what it states.
So while expectation of time would be a factor, it wouldn't be the only factor and that alone couldn't break out of the physical constraints of the system.
I think hunger is comparable: one can be hungry over time as a result of the natural changes in their body, or they can become hungry merely by looking at appetising food. I think psychology can play a useful, but complicated role.
Serotonin is involved in all of it. The perception of time. As well as insulin secretion and blood glucose control, directly. As well as inflammation, which is a big part of diabetes, as well as in psychedelics – serotonin receptor 5-HT2A activation is immunomodulatory; It reduces inflammation.
Ah they should have asked the different groups to change game at varying intervals. Now they can’t rule out that switching games faster is the cause for more sugar burning.
Take it a step further. Does our blood sugar affect the rate at which clocks advance? Because, according to the (rather digestible) article, that was the controlled variable.
That doesn't sound impossible. Like a CPU running slower when the power is janky, there's something appealing to the thought that we experience the passage of time differently based on internal physical processes. There's the trope of "time standing still" when some intense experience is happening - perhaps flooding the system with adrenaline has the opposite effect and speeds up perceived time?
So my boss decides to spice it up a bit, and mixes in some hot salsa. I didn't notice. Each day he gradually added more until it was all the hot stuff. I didn't notice. He went out and bought hotter stuff. For some reason the whole office was watching me when I made some quiet comment about the mild salsa being hotter than it used to be. They thought that was pretty funny.
But I really didn't notice. If you can lie to the tongue, why not the liver?