Your brain forms the taste of food before the first bite
By Sachin Rawat | Published: 2025-01-13 14:29:00 | Source: Neuropsych – Big Think
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I recently ate a frog for the first time. If you’ve never had frogs before, the thought of eating them might cause you some disgust. I felt a little nervous when I ordered the salt roasted legs off the menu, but I read reviews that said the frog meat tasted like chicken and was tender and buttery. They also look like fried chicken wings, except smaller, and choosing a dish that displayed as little patrician anatomy as possible made it easier for me to overcome my initial hesitation.
After those first nervous bites, I enjoyed the dish, and yes, it did taste like chicken. However, if you cannot eat a particular food item, no matter how hard you try, it is likely that your negative expectations, more than the taste itself, are determining this outcome.
Scientists who study how the brain generates experiences usually study how different sensory inputs are combined. This is because, contrary to expectations, sensory input is directly observable and quantifiable. It is easy, for example, to measure the sugar content of drinks to determine whether they are sweet or not. But our expectations of the same drink—set by our beliefs, peers, cultures, and media representations—also shape the way we experience sweetness, and that perception is largely difficult to measure. But thanks to clever new experiments, scientists have discovered how expectations affect our personal experience of food.
Find pleasure and pain in hot sauce
One of the most prominent ways in which expectations shape the culinary experience is through the placebo effect. The mere expectation of the pill’s effectiveness can relieve pain even in the absence of any therapeutic entity; Conversely, in a phenomenon called nocebo, the expectation that treatment will be painful can cause anxiety and pain. Something similar happens with food, and our expectations can increase or decrease our enjoyment of what we eat.
In a recent study published in PLoS Biologyresearchers investigated how expectations of pleasure or pain are caused in the brain Interpreting the same food differently. Study participants were divided into two groups: those who liked hot sauce and those who did not. Both groups tasted samples of high- and low-intensity sauces while their brain activity was mapped using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They were also shown brief pictures of either gray or colored peppers. This visual cue indicated the level of spiciness in the sauce they were about to taste, although participants were not explicitly told what the cues meant.
“We wanted to understand how the information you receive could modify your expectations, how that would impact your experience, and how that could impact how your brain represents the stimulus you experience,” Kenneth Kishida, a neuroscientist at Wake Forest School of Medicine and corresponding author of the study, told Big Think.
After each tasting, participants were asked to rate how spicy the sauce was and how much they enjoyed it. When the group that liked hot sauce expected a mild sauce, thanks to visual cues, their rating of the level of heat was lower than when they tasted the same sauce without any such expectation. Conversely, expectations did not change the heat level rating in the group that did not like hot sauce, but they did deepen their dislike regardless of whether they expected low or high intensity sauce. This result showed that the subjective taste of the sauce is a product of both actual and perceived spiciness.
The two groups also showed markedly different neurobehavioral responses. Among those who liked hot sauce, expectations of hot sauce increased activity in brain regions associated with placebo response, which is also a pleasant signature. On the other hand, pain-related brain activity patterns saw a slight increase in the hate group. Both groups felt the sting of capsaicin, the compound in hot peppers that causes their burning sensation. However, negative expectations increased their intensity for the disliked group.
Why do we love the foods we love?
It’s not just pepper either. Studies looking at wine show this Many factors Adjusting the drinker’s expectations of how it will taste. This includes color hues, price, the label on the bottle, and even the glass the wine is served in.
In one Wine tasting experiencetasters rated the same wine differently based on the rating they were given before tasting it. Compared to the control group, tasters who received a positive evaluation liked it better, while those who received a negative evaluation did not like it more. Wine tasters weren’t just conformists; The information they received about wine was translated into different sensory perceptions. Those who expected the wine to be bad were more likely to be aware of the clues associated with the bad wine.
Furthermore, taste is only part of what creates flavour. The oral cavity picks up odors, known as postnasal olfaction, which are perceived as tastes. The mucous membrane in the mouth can sense chemicals, which is why some foods can feel cold or hot. Then there is the texture of the food. These sensations combine to form a cohesive and familiar experience; However, as with taste, they are perceived differently based on expectations.
When you bite into something that tastes like candy, you expect it to taste sweet. If not, the experience can be annoying. A 2008 study offered participants pink ice cream They didn’t know it tasted like salmon. Participants tasted what ice cream tasted like, had the consistency of ice cream, and extracted it like ice cream but was presented to them as either ice cream or a frozen salty mousse. When it was labeled as ice cream, even people who liked salmon mousse hated the salmon-flavored ice cream.
As Putu Agus Khorisantono, a cognitive and behavioral neuroscientist at Karolinska Institutet, said in an interview: “If you expect ice cream and then it suddenly turns into salmon mousse, that expectation is violated, which reduces pleasure and makes people perceive it as disgusting.” However, those who thought they were eating a frozen, salty mousse were better prepared mentally and, therefore, were not so disappointed.
The human mind creates an internal model of the world based on past experiences. Expectations about how something should feel or taste create a cognitive shortcut, allowing for rapid processing of incoming stimuli. But when expectations don’t match sensory input, as when something that tastes like ice cream tastes like salmon mousse, the brain must adapt its internal model.
Foods that elicit strong negative associations, including for cultural or social reasons, also provide examples of expectancy violations. Take durian, the fleshy fruit with a distinctive and often hated odor. For Khorisantono, who grew up eating and loving durian, the smell doesn’t raise the expectation that it will taste particularly bad.
“But people who didn’t grow up eating it associate it with the closest thing it smells to, which many people say is fruits, vegetables or spoiled socks,” he added. They don’t expect the fruit to smell that way and they attach negative expectations that make it taste worse.
Living up to one’s expectations
Holding expectations about subjective experiences can be overwhelming. Khorisantono admits that although he has researched the phenomenon, he is not immune to it. “I think the bread I get from a nice bakery tastes better than the bread I get from the supermarket, even if they are baked by the same baker and contain the same ingredients, just because I paid less for it at the supermarket.” Likewise, many people associate expensive food with nutritious food or believe that more expensive wine necessarily tastes better.
But this does not mean that we are limited by our preconceptions. We can use expectations to our advantage. Setting expectations can help shape people’s attitudes toward things they need to do, such as eating healthy or going to the gym. “If you think about what you plan to do and set those expectations in a positive light, you can put yourself in the right brain state when the moment comes,” Kishida suggested.
“If you think about what you plan to do and set those expectations in a positive light, you can put yourself in the right brain state when the moment comes.”
Kenneth Kishida
Consider, for example, getting children to eat vegetables. Most children hate vegetables, and there’s a good reason for that: vegetables often taste bitter, and children are more sensitive to bitterness. But another reason why children hate vegetables is because society expects them to. “There are a lot of cartoons and comic strips where kids hate vegetables and kids start to internalize that,” Khorisantono said, calling it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Gradually increasing the vegetable content in their meals can encourage children to eat more of them. When they eat vegetables with foods they like, their brain will begin to associate the flavors and textures of the vegetables with positive expectations.
In a new study published in the journal Food quality and preferencesKhrysantono and colleagues showed this Pre-exposure and starvation Make people more accepting of new food groups and dislike foods that they think are less disgusting. “If we wait until children are hungry to offer them food, this encourages them to like this new combination of smell and flavour, or at least find it less off-putting,” he noted.
Looking beyond the senses
The experience of eating any food is not just a multi-sensory experience but much more than that. A growing body of research shows that the brain takes into account more than direct sensory information in creating the experiences we have.
The neuroscience of expectations can be used to make foods more enjoyable, whether that’s through nutritional interventions, such as children eating vegetables, or even creating new foods. Imagine foods that tap into our love of fatty foods without the expensive fat content. “When we like food because it is fatty, it is mostly because of the texture and not because we can taste the fat,” Khorisantono said. “If we can develop something that mimics the texture of fat, people will enjoy it as much as they like fat, if they like fatty foods.”
“Your expectations and beliefs about what things will be like in the coming moments, that feeds into it,” Kishida said, adding: “Exactly how that will happen is a big open question.” If scientists figure this out, we may be able to take advantage of neuroscience to improve the taste of food and understand why we can or cannot make the choices we do.
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