Please answer the following questions in a 250-word response minimum. Try your best to reference the text if needed please do so attached to the assignment is a pdf file of the text book used in this class.
(outside sources are okay, but please cite)
1. Describe a time when you smelled or tasted a specific food and it triggered a memory involving that food. Explain the parts of the brain involved in creating this memory. How is your taste preference influenced during emotional times in your life? Support your response with concepts in Sensation and Perception.
2. What is CIPA? What might life be like with it? What does it say about our sense of pain?
3. How do the four primary mechanoreceptors work to give you different qualities of touch?
4. What sensory input contributes to our perception of flavor?
Please participate (respond) to the classmates answers with notable and educational input. (200 word minimum Reponses)
1. Kelly: Hello classmates and facilitator. The one time that I can really remember is whenever I smell chicken or turkey, I remember my first Thanksgiving dinner in my first home. It was the best. I still remember that day like it was yesterday. I remember how the whole house smelled of food cooking and mainly the turkey cooking and I remember all the laughing and kids playing and the flavors of the food. Whenever I smell some turkey all my senses go back to that Thanksgiving day and I have never had a day like that one day since then. Emotions have a lot of what to do with what you eat. Like depressed women usually always go for ice cream and chocolates. When you feel lazy you eat more potato chips and cookies and sodas. It is like we read that our brains are always working and remembering things and there are certain things that can trigger our memories through our senses. This is just like if we see a certain thing and it can trigger memories or if we hear a certain sound that triggers a memory. Like to this day whenever I hear the song Desperado I remember that being the song my father was always singing when I was little. So our memories are always working even when we do not realize it.
2. Catherine:The baking of pies, cookies, and breads trigger my memory to my grandma. She loved to bake and I loved watching her and helping her, Mt grandmother passed when I was a child. However when I smell these familiar and comforting smells, I am brought to my grandma's kitchen. I an standing on a chair helping her or I am being her favorite taste tester, See, when we actually do taste or smell something from the past, we are revisiting an experience that memory has been unable to keep alive directly. The intensity of the vivid return of something long lost to time.
A smell can bring on a flood of memories, influence people's moods and even affect their work performance. Because the olfactory bulb is part of the brain's limbic system, an area so closely associated with memory and feeling it's sometimes called the "emotional brain," smell can call up memories and powerful responses almost instantaneously.
The olfactory bulb has intimate access to the amygdala, which processes emotion, and the hippocampus, which is responsible for associative learning. Despite the tight wiring, however, smells would not trigger memories if it weren't for conditioned responses. When you first smell a new scent, you link it to an event, a person, a thing or even a moment. Your brain forges a link between the smell and a memory -- associating the smell of chlorine with summers at the pool or lilies with a funeral. When you encounter the smell again, the link is already there, ready to elicit a memory or a mood. Chlorine might call up a specific pool-related memory or simply make you feel content. Lilies might agitate you without your knowing why. This is part of the reason why not everyone likes the same smells.
3. Griffin: Hello classmates and facilitator. Congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA), also called hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy type IV--is an extremely rare inherited disorder of the nervous system which prevents the sensation of pain, heat, cold, or any real nerve-related sensations (including feeling the need to urinate); however, patients can still feel pressure. People with this disorder are very likely to injure themselves in ways that would normally be prevented by feeling pain. For example, a patient could burn themselves severely and not even notice. The main features of the disorder are lack of pain sensation, painless injuries of the arms, legs and oral structures, hyperthermia during hot weather because of inability to sweat, syndromic intellectual disability as a result of hyperthermia, infection and scarring of the tongue, lips and gums, chronic infections of bones and joints, bone fractures, multiple scars, osteomyelitis and joint deformities, which may lead to amputation. Other common problems are eye related, such as infection due to the sufferers rubbing them too hard, too frequently or scratching them during sleep. In addition, patients typically lack unmyelinated and small myelinated nerve fibers in the dorsal root ganglion. Both are responsible for transmitting pain signals. In addition, patients' sweat glands are normal in both structure and function, though they lack innervations by small diameter neurons.
4. Krisitine: Despite its common usage, the term "flavor" can be difficult to define. In fact, people with different expertise tend to use the term "flavor" to mean slightly different things, even if they are all referring to food. Flavor chemists typically mean the aroma alone, many experts in sensory evaluation use flavor to mean the combination of taste, smell, and chemesthesis, while chefs tend to see flavor as a more dynamic experience that depends not only on the food per se, but also on its presentation as well the environment is which it is served. The International Organization for Standardization defines flavor as follows:
Complex combination of the olfactory, gustatory and trigeminal sensations perceived during tasting. The flavour may be influenced by tactile, thermal, painful and/or kinaesthetic effects.However, none of these definitions really seems to fully cover the combination of sensations experienced when eating or drinking. The following is a summary of how the different senses experienced when eating and drinking interact and create the overall perception.
The results of many studies indicate the sensations of taste and smell interact. Odor ratings increase with increasing taste compound concentration, and taste ratings increase with increasing odor compound concentration. Rating increases are larger for harmonious taste-odor pairs, or taste-odor pairs that are typically encountered together, than for unusual taste-odor pairs. Adding sucrose to fruit juices will increase sweetness, decrease bitterness and sourness, as well as decreasing unripe odor ratings and increasing fruit odor ratings. Retrived from: Delwiche (2004), Food Quality and Preference.