Music Can Reach the Brain’s Taste Regions Without Any Food
Music playing while food hits the tongue makes the brain respond more strongly to taste, according to new brain scans from Denmark. Music by itself, with no food involved, also activated some of the same brain regions that process taste.
Researchers say the results point to flavor being built by the brain, not by the tongue alone. “With brain scans, we gain a biological window into what happens when the senses interact,” said first author Alberte Baggesgaard Seeberg, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Food Science. The work appears in Scientific Reports.
Before anyone reshuffles a dinner playlist, the details matter. The study scanned just 28 adults, tested only simple sugar and sour drinks, and saw little clear change in how strong the tastes seemed. The extra brain activity may also partly reflect the order of testing.
Brain Scans Tracked Music and Taste Together
Earlier experiments showed that sound can change how food seems. Amplifying the crunch of chips and apples made them seem crispier, and music matched to a taste, a practice called “sonic seasoning,” shifted perceived sweetness. Until now, that evidence came mostly from volunteers rating food with and without music. Brain scans let researchers watch what the brain itself was doing.
Researchers recruited 48 healthy, right-handed adults, 27 of them women, with an average age of 27.5. Technical problems early in the study left usable brain-scan data from 28 of them.
Inside the MRI machine, a small tube dripped a sugar solution or a sour solution made with citric acid onto each volunteer’s tongue. Scanner-safe headphones played one of two soundtracks. The sweet one used high pitches, smooth notes, and pleasant harmony. The sour one kept the high pitches but added sharper notes and mildly clashing harmony.
Over about an hour in the scanner, volunteers experienced music and taste together first, then taste alone and music alone. Afterward, all 48 volunteers tasted five mixtures running from fully sweet to fully sour, some with the soundtracks playing and some in silence, and rated each for pleasantness, sweetness, sourness, and how well the sound matched the taste.
Music and Taste Activate Some Shared Brain Areas
Sweet and sour tastes, and the soundtracks built to match them, lit up overlapping parts of the brain, meaning some of the same areas responded to both. A few handle touch and mouth sensation. Others, near the front of the brain, are linked to reward and pleasure.
Sweetness came with a catch. The overlap showed up when researchers compared which regions were active under each condition, but a stricter check, comparing the scans one tiny point at a time, could not confirm it. Sourness did clear that bar, barely: a patch of just three scan pixels in a touch-processing area on the right side of the brain. The authors also caution that two conditions activating one region does not prove the same nerve cells respond to both.
Pairing Music With Taste Boosted Brain Activity
Adding music raised activity in taste and mouth-sensation regions for both flavors, compared with tasting the same liquid alone. Because the music-and-taste round always came first, novelty may explain part of the boost, the authors note.
Whether the music had to match the taste was a trickier question. Sweet liquid paired with the sweet soundtrack produced more activity in hearing regions and in a taste-processing region than the same liquid with the sour soundtrack. Sour showed no such difference. Researchers read the pattern as mostly about having music playing at the same time, with a bonus from matching in the sweet condition.
Source : https://studyfinds.com/music-brain-respond-strongly-taste/
