Before beginning this blog post, I and the rest of the E-Board from Rutgers BRAIN wanted to say thank you for being such interactive members during our hybrid semester. We greatly appreciate your ongoing attendance and contributions here at our organization. Hopefully, we'll be able to speak face-to-face during the upcoming semesters. For now, we wish you good luck on your finals and a happy holidays!
Prior to starting the meeting, we mentioned our future plans for the next semester of Rutgers BRAIN, such as holding an event or trip and the E-Board interviews. For those who actively attend our meetings and are interested in becoming an E-board member, keep an eye out for an e-mail regarding the applications. They'll be opening up in a couple of months time!
Moving on with the actual meeting, we began by discussing the neuroscience of taste. We talked about the process of how we are able to ascertain and differentiate our tastes with sweet and bitter food. Some individuals may even differentiate flavor profiles more definitively than others—we call those people supertasters! On the opposite end, there are those that make negative associations to food that have made them sick—we define that process as developing a taste aversion. Moreover, we discussed the foundation of taste and how it has evolved and grown overtime throughout different centuries and age groups.
Next, we described the neural process of forming memory associations with the smell of an object. Moreover, we showcased a neuroscience study that showed how humans and animals perceive smell. At the end of our meeting, we played a Kahoot! as our interactive activity.
As always, if you missed out on this meeting, click the image below to view the PowerPoint presentation. For updates on our future meetings and events at Rutgers BRAIN, be sure to follow us at our Instagram,@rutgers_brain, and our Facebook, Rutgers BRAIN.
