Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 16, 2012

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REAL LIFE NEWS: WHY DOES COFFEE SMELL SO GOOD, BUT TASTE SO AWFUL?

by Hazed

I don’t drink coffee. Can’t stand the taste. I don’t like it as a drink, nor do I like coffee-flavoured ice cream, or chocolates. What a terrible waste of good chocolate!

But I love the smell of freshly brewed coffee.

I am not alone in finding the smell delicious, but the taste disgusting - or, at least, disappointing - and scientists have now figured out why coffee never tastes as good as it smells.

It turns out that we actually have two different senses of smell. The one you all think of as smell is when you take a sniff through your nostrils. But when you swallow something, a burst of aroma goes up the back of the nose from inside the mouth. This “second sense of smell” is less receptive to the flavour, so the sensation is completely different, and less satisfying.

This also explains the opposite effect you find with some substances such as cheese, where they smell rank but taste wonderful.

Professor Barry Smith of the University of London explained, “We have got two senses of smell. One sense is when you inhale things from the environment into you, and the other is when the air comes out of you up the nasal passage and is breathed out through the nose.”

When we taste things, we use sensors on our tongue as you were always taught in school (although it’s worth mentioning in passing that those old tongue maps of different areas of the tongue tasting different things are rubbish) but 80% of what we think of as taste is actually coming from the smell receptors in the nose. That’s why when you have a heavy cold, your food loses its taste.

The receptors, which relay messages to our brain, react to odours differently depending on which direction they are moving in.

“Think of a smelly cheese like Epoisses,” Prof Smith said. “It smells like the inside of a teenager’s training shoe. But once it’s in your mouth, and you are experiencing the odour through the nose in the other direction, it is delicious.

“Then there is the example of when they don’t match in the other direction. The smell of freshly brewed coffee is absolutely wonderful, but aren’t you always just a little bit disappointed when you taste it? It can never quite give you that hit.”

There are only two substances which smell the same no matter which direction the odour is travelling - into the nose or out of it. One is lavender. The other is...

Chocolate!

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/9528936/Why-does-coffee-never-taste-as-good-as-it-smells.html

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