Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Why blocked nose distress food Taste

As anyone suffering during a head cold knows, food tastes wrong when the nose is congested, an experience that leads many to conclude that the sense of taste operates usually only when the olfactory system is also in excellent working order.

Evidence that the taste system influences olfactory perception, however, has been vanishingly rare—awaiting now. In a novel study this week in Nature Neuroscience, a Brandeis researcher details just such an influence.

Neuroscientist Don Katz and colleagues discovered that if the taste cortex in rats is inactivated when a rat first smells an odour, at least a food odour.

“We discovered that rats use their taste system to smell with, so when you knock out the taste cortex, yet for an hour, as we did, you alter their sense of smell".

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