Scientists believe the ability to detect bitter tastes is designed to be a safety measure to avoid food that has gone off.”The ability to taste bitter substances has always been associated with poison detection, but now we have found all these health associations,” Professor Bartoshuk said. “We know that people’s whole diets are different, based on their taste sensitivity.”Supertasters perceive all tastes more intensely but the bitter effect is the largest. Supertasters also perceive oral burning and oral touching as more intense. Chefs are more likely to be supertasters.”In older men, we found that the number of polyps in the colon was directly correlated with the bitter [they] perceived.

In addition, the men with polyps ate fewer vegetables and were heavier, both risks factors known to be associated with colon cancers,” said Professor Bartoshuk.”We want to see what things suppress bitter the best. We want people to eat these foods so we have to figure out ways of preparing them in a way that is tolerable, and inhibiting bitter is one of them.”Experiments show that being supersensitive to the taste of bitter is related to race – white Caucasians for instance are less likely to be supertasters than Asians. The ability to taste bitterness is largely determined by a single gene which is located on human chromosome number five, Professor Bartoshuk said.. Considering our cultural pre-occupation with sex, it is rather surprising that the first brain-scan studies of sexual arousal have only just been published. Mario Beauregard of the Neurological Institute of Montreal recorded the brain activity of men and women while they watched erotic videos.

Unsurprisingly, he found that the regions devoted to processing visual data were busy but so also were circuits in the amygdala, linked with emotions, and a region in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) – just behind the eye sockets – that handles judgements. It’s a search that dates back to the last century when neurologists would gather reports of patients who had lost some ability due to damage to a certain area of the brain.In 1861, for instance, the Frenchman Paul Broca reported his finding that a small area on the left side of the brain is vital for speech. Just over a hundred years later, the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks revealed in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the remarkable effect of the destruction of part of the parietal lobe – you lose the ability to comprehend the meaning of shapes.For the last 20 years, however, neurologists haven’t had to wait for cases to come to them, they can peer into the fearsomely complex workings of the brain using scanning techniques known as fMRi (functional magnetic resonance imaging). Using very sophisticated calculations, this allows researchers to see which brain regions are using up more oxygen when you are performing some task – such as watching erotic movies.

The assumption is that the more active areas are involved with the task at hand. The long-term hope would be to develop drugs to treat regions that are malfunctioning.The erotic-movies research might sound frivolous – one eminent journal rejected it on the curious grounds that it “was not of general interest”. But, in fact, it is part of a project to understand addiction better. Drugs such as cocaine and heroin work by hijacking pleasure pathways in the brain that evolved hundreds of millions of years ago to make sure that animals were powerfully interested in sex.Some researchers believe that a better understanding of these sexual pathways might throw light on the workings of addiction.