Personality, PROP, and mint sensation
Tasters of PROP, and people who sense coolness when they taste LifeSaverTM mints, say :
- The crackle of flames of a wood fire stimulate my imagination.
- My thoughts often don't occur as words but as visual images.
- I like to watch cloud shapes change in the sky.
- I can be deeply moved by a sunset.
In other words they become absorbed in and take pleasure from VISUAL experience. And coupled with this visual absorption and pleasure is a tendency to experience vivid memories.
Proust's madeleine
Proust described the experience of this type of absorption perfectly:
Öand shortly thereafter, mechanically, loaded down by the dreary day and the prospect of a sad tomorrow, I brought to my lips a spoonful of tea into which I had let a piece of madeleine soften. But at the very instant that the mouthful mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I shuddered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated - no notion of its cause. It immediately rendered all the vicissitudes of life unimportant, life's disasters harmless, its brevity illusoryÖ
ÖAnd suddenly the memory appeared to me...But, when nothing remains of a remote past, after the death of beings, after the destruction of things, only smell and flavor, more frail but more lively, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, only they last for long, like ghosts, to be recalled, waiting, hoping (on the ruins of all the rest) to carry without bowing, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.
M. Proust ~ Translation VU
Does taste sensitivity translate into choice of profession?
We began exploring this question by attending the National Resataurant Association Restaurant Hotel-Motel Show in May 2004. There, we found that chefs and food preparers had significantly higher trigeminal sensitivity than did others, as shown in the graph below:
They also had significantly higher visual absorption. We are conducting further studies to see whether other choices of profession (non-food related) are associated with taster status.
Taste, smell, and reasoning
Overall, we have found that people of different taste sensitivity tend to approach decision-making in differing ways, even problems concerning issues that have nothing to do with flavor or food!
- mildly sensitive tasters tend rely more on logical reasoning to arrive at decisions than do other tasters;
- moderately sensitive tasters are more likely to ìplay things by earî and improvise;
- and highly sensitive tasters tend to spend time mulling things over, often ìsleepingî on a problem if it is complex.
The reason for these differences may come from the fact that taste, smell, and trigeminal sensations all reach the same area on the right side of the brain, called the orbitofrontal cortex. This cortex weighs values and appreciates contingencies-the specifics of a situation, rather than its general characteristics. No such input arrives in the part of the brain involved in logical sequential reasoning, called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, Our guess that you may become more involved in considering contingencies if you have strong sensations arriving in your orbitofrontal cortex, but logic will dominate if your orbitofrontal cortex is less active.
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