![]() But touch a cockroach to it, and it will have that effect. “It won't necessarily make that food inedible. “Take something that you really don't like, a bitter vegetable, and just touch it to a food that you do like,” he says. A more compelling way to think of disgust, he says, is by what's called the contamination response. Disgust," has refined that definition further. ![]() In 1872, Charles Darwin took an early stab at defining disgust, writing that the the term “refers to something revolting, primarily in relation to the sense of taste, as actually perceived or vividly imagined.” Rozin, known to some as "Dr. And for that, you should turn to Paul Rozin, a well-known psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been trying to answer that question since the 1980s. ![]() To answer those head-scratchers, you first have to understand what disgust really is. Six out of 10 respondents simply claimed to be disgusted by the odor and taste another 18 percent cited a cheese intolerance or allergy.īut those results still didn’t answer the fundamental question of what it is about strong-smelling cheese that makes it revolting to so many-and by extension, what makes some foods more disgusting than others. The survey also sought to understand what exactly it was about cheese that turned so many stomachs. “It was quite unexpected,” he says, “but it is probably the same thing in other countries in Europe, and in the USA too.”įor the purposes of the survey, those who rated their liking for cheese between 0 and 3 on a 10-point desirability scale were considered “disgusted.” More than half of them actually rated it at rock bottom, from 0 to 1. Even in cheese-loving France, he found, 11.5 percent of respondents were disgusted by stinky cheese-more than triple the rate among other foods like fish or meats. Royet’s study included a 332-person survey that sought to quantify the extent of stinky cheese aversion. But while scanning people’s brains as they experience an olfactory onslaught may be entertaining, it could also be illuminating. The work recently won an Ig Nobel, the parody Nobel Prize-inspired awards intended to celebrate science that first makes you laugh but then makes you think (or in this case, stink). Further, inactivity in a region that typically fires up when hungry people see food led Royet to suggest that those disgusted by cheese may no longer view it as food at all. ![]() Pumping the scents of blue cheese, cheddar, goat cheese, Gruyere, Parmesan and tomme into volunteers’ noses revealed that the brain's reward center displayed aversion behavior activity among cheese haters, reports lead author Jean-Pierre Royet. Last year, for instance, researchers at the Université de Lyon used fMRI imaging to explore the brains of both cheese lovers and haters while they were viewing and inhaling dairy. Today these pioneers of the revolting are using brain-scanning to take a detailed look at what these polarizing foods actually do to our brains. They want to know why we react they way we do to stinky cheeses-with revulsion or desire-because uncovering the roots of this love/hate relationship could reveal the neural basis of disgust. Neuroscientists, it turns out, are fascinated by this pungent scenario. The question is: Are you thinking “ooh, time to eat” or “ew, smelly feet”? Your host has just unveiled a show-stopping block of blue cheese, which is now pumping out an almost tangible odor thanks to the bacterial hordes going to town on the crumbling hunk. You're enjoying the wine, music and sparkling conversation-when suddenly the soiree is invaded by an unexpected guest.
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