Brain Flavor

Ever trust your gut more than your brain? Turns out following your gut feelings might still actually be following what your brain tells you, albeit a different part of your brain. Dr. Virginia Utermohlen, who runs the Taste Science Laboratory at Cornell, studies the way flavor and smell receptors in the tongue interact with the brain, and even how they influence our food choices, decisions and even our personalities. Logical reasoning is handled by the dorsal-lateral prefrontal cortex, while our gut instincts are formed by the orbito-frontal cortex, all inside the brain. Interestingly, the dorsal-lateral prefrontal cortex gets no input from the body on matters of smell and taste, while the orbito-frontal cortex does. {via my new favorite book, Cooking For Geeks}