快猫短视频

I like drinking tea, but my husband hates it. Are we tasting the same flavours? If so, why the difference?

鈥� Whether you and your husband experience flavours in the same way, we cannot say, any more than we know whether you both see the colour green in the same way. Understanding how sensory signals translate into subjective feelings is, after all, known as the 鈥渉ard problem of consciousness鈥�.

One difference between you and your husband that could help account for your tastes is past experience.

If, for example, he once drank tea just before a very nauseating experience, that might put him off it permanently, whether he could remember the event or not. Alternatively, he might never have had tea until he was old enough to decide that he did not like this nasty, astringent stuff, whereas most of us probably had our first tea early in childhood and grew up liking it.

鈥淭aste nerve endings may differ and send different messages to different individuals鈥� brains鈥�

Another possibility is that the proteins in his taste and olfactory nerve endings differ from yours, and therefore they send quite different messages to his brain. Even if they do send the same message, if your brains are wired differently then his will post yuck messages to one place, while yours will send positive signals elsewhere.

Jon Richfield, Somerset West, South Africa