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So I had this very interesting experience

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five years ago.

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You know, me and my husband,
we were out grocery shopping,

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as we do every other day,

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but this time, we found this fancy,

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you know, I'm talking fair-trade,
I'm talking organic,

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I'm talking Kenyan, single-origin coffee

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that we splurged and got.

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And that was when the problem
started already.

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You know, my husband,
he deemed this coffee blend superior

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to our regular and much cheaper coffee,

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which made me imagine a life
based solely on fancy coffee

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and I saw our household budget explode.

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(Laughter)

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And worse ...

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I also feared that this investment
would be in vain.

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That we wouldn't be able to notice
this difference after all.

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Unfortunately, especially for my husband,

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he had momentarily forgotten
that he's married to a neuroscientist

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with a specialty in food science.

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(Laughter)

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Alright?

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So without further ado,

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I mean, I just put him to the test.

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I set up an experiment

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where I first blindfolded my husband.

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(Laughter)

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Then I brewed the two types of coffee

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and I told him that
I would serve them to him

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one at a time.

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Now, with clear certainty,

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my husband, he described
the first cup of coffee

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as more raw and bitter.

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You know, a coffee
that would be ideal for the mornings

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with the sole purpose of terrorizing
the body awake by its alarming taste.

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(Laughter)

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The second cup of coffee,
on the other hand,

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was both fruity and delightful.

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You know, coffee that one
can enjoy in the evening and relax.

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Little did my husband know, however,

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that I hadn't actually given him
the two types of coffee.

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I had given him the exact same
cup of coffee twice.

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(Laughter)

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And obviously, it wasn't
this one cup of coffee

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that had suddenly gone
from horrible to fantastic.

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No, this taste difference
was a product of my husband's own mind.

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Of his bias in favor of the fancy coffee

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that made him experience taste differences
that just weren't there.

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Alright, so, having saved
our household budget,

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and finishing on a very good laugh,

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me especially --

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(Laughter)

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I then started wondering
just how we could have received

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two such different responses
from a single cup of coffee.

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Why would my husband
make such a bold statement

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at the risk of being publicly mocked
for the rest of his life?

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(Laughter)

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The striking answer is
that I think you would have done the same.

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And that's the biggest challenge
in my field of science,

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assessing what's reality
behind these answers

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that we receive.

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Because how are we
going to make food tastier

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if we cannot rely on what people
actually say they like?

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To understand, let's first have a look
at how we actually sense food.

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When I drink a cup of coffee,

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I detect this cup of coffee
by receptors on my body,

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information which is then turned
into activated neurons in my brain.

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Wavelengths of light
are converted to colors.

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Molecules in the liquid
are detected by receptors in my mouth,

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and categorized as one
of five basic tastes.

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That's salty, sour,
bitter, sweet and umami.

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Molecules in the air
are detected by receptors in my nose

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and converted to odors.

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And ditto for touch, for temperature,
for sound and more.

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All this information is detected
by my receptors

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and converted into signals
between neurons in my brain.

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Information which is then
woven together and integrated,

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so that my brain recognizes

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that yes, I just had a cup of coffee,
and yes, I liked it.

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And only then,

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after all this neuron heavy lifting,

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do we consciously experience
this cup of coffee.

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And this is now where we have
a very common misconception.

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People tend to think
that what we experience consciously

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must then be an absolute
true reflection of reality.

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But as you just heard,

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there are many stages
of neural interpretation

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in between the physical item
and the conscious experience of it.

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Which means that sometimes,

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this conscious experience is not really
reflecting that reality at all.

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Like what happened to my husband.

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That's because some physical stimuli
may just be so weak

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that they just can't break that barrier
to enter our conscious mind,

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while the information that does

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may get twisted on its way there
by our hidden biases.

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And people, they have a lot of biases.

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Yes, if you're sitting there
right now, thinking ...

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you could probably have done
better than my husband,

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you could probably have assessed
those coffees correctly,

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then you're actually
suffering from a bias.

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A bias called the bias blind spot.

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Our tendency to see ourselves
as less biased than other people.

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(Laughter)

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And yeah, we can even be biased

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about the biases that we're biased about.

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(Laughter)

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Not trying to make this any easier.

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A bias that we know in the food industry
is the courtesy bias.

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This is a bias where we give an opinion

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which is considered socially acceptable,

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but it's certainly not
our own opinion, right?

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And I'm challenged by this
as a food researcher,

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because when people say they like
my new sugar-reduced milkshake,

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do they now?

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(Laughter)

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Or are they saying they like it

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because they know I'm listening
and they want to please me?

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Or maybe they just to seem
fit and healthy in my ears.

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I wouldn't know.

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But worse, they wouldn't
even know themselves.

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Even trained food assessors,

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and that's people who have been
explicitly taught

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to disentangle the sense of smell
and the sense of taste,

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may still be biased
to evaluate products sweeter

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if they contain vanilla.

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Why?

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Well, it's certainly not
because vanilla actually tastes sweet.

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It's because even these
professionals are human,

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and have eaten lot of desserts, like us,

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and have therefore learned to associate
sweetness and vanilla.

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So taste and smell
and other sensory information

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is inextricably entangled
in our conscious mind.

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So on one hand, we can actually use this.

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We can use these conscious experiences,

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use this data, exploit it
by adding vanilla instead of sugar

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to sweeten our products.

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But on the other hand,

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with these conscious evaluations,

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I still wouldn't know

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whether people actually liked
that sugar-reduced milkshake.

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So how do we get around this problem?

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How do we actually assess what's reality

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behind these conscious food evaluations?

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The key is to remove the barrier
of the conscious mind

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and instead target the information
in the brain directly.

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And it turns out

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our brain holds a lot
of fascinating secrets.

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Our brain constantly receives
sensory information from our entire body,

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most of which we don't even
become aware of,

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like the taste information
that I constantly receive

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from my gastrointestinal tract.

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And my brain will also act
on all this sensory information.

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It will alter my behavior
without my knowledge,

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and it can increase
the diameter of my pupils

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if I experience something I really like.

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And increase my sweat production
ever so slightly

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if that emotion was intense.

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And with brain scans,

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we can now assess
this information in the brain.

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Specifically, I have used
a brain-scanning technique

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called electroencephalography,

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or "EEG" in short,

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which involves wearing a cap
studded with electrodes,

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128 in my case.

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Each electrode then measures
the electrical activity of the brain

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with precision down to the millisecond.

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The problem is, however,

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it's not just the brain
that's electrically active,

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it's also the rest of the body
as well as the environment

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that contains a lot
of electrical activity all the time.

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To do my research,

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I therefore need
to minimize all this noise.

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So I ask my participants
to do a number of things here.

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First off,

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I ask them to rest their head
in a chin rest,

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to avoid too much muscle movement.

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I also ask them to, meanwhile,
stare at the center of a computer monitor

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to avoid too much
eye movements and eye blinks.

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And I can't even have swallowing,

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so I ask my participants
to stick the tongue out of their mouth

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over a glass bowl,

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and then I constantly let
taste stimuli onto the tongue,

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which then drip off into this bowl.

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(Laughter)

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And then, just to complete
this wonderful picture,

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I also provide my participants with a bib,

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available in either pink
or blue, as they please.

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(Laughter)

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Looks like a normal
eating experience, right?

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(Laughter)

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No, obviously not.

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And worse,

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I can't even control
what my participants are thinking about,

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so I need to repeat this taste procedure

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multiple times.

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Maybe the first time,
they're thinking about the free lunch

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that I provide for participating,

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or maybe the second time,
they're thinking about Christmas coming up

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and what to get for Mom
this year, you know.

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But common for each response
is the response to the taste.

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So I repeat this taste
procedure multiple times.

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Sixty, in fact.

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And then I average the responses,

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because responses unrelated
to taste will average out.

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And using this method,

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we and other labs,

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have investigated how long a time
it takes from "food lands on our tongue"

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until our brain has figured out
which taste it's experiencing.

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Turns out this occurs within the first
already 100 milliseconds,

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that's about half a second
before we even become aware of it.

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And next up, we also investigated

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the taste difference between sugar
and artificial sweeteners

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that in our setup taste extremely similar.

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In fact, they tasted so similar

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that half my participants
could only barely tell the taste apart,

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while the other half simply couldn't.

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But amazingly,

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if we looked across
the entire group of participants,

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we saw that their brains
definitely could tell the taste apart.

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So with EEG and other
brain-scanning devices

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and other physiological measures --

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sweat and pupil size --

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we have new gateways to our brain.

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Gateways that will help us
remove the barrier of the conscious mind

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to see through the biases of people

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and possibly even capture
subconscious taste differences.

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And that's because we can now measure
people's very first response to food

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before they've become conscious of it,

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and before they've started rationalizing
why they like it or not.

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We can measure people's
facial expressions,

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we can measure where they're looking,

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we can measure their sweat response,

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we can measure their brain response.

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And with all these measures,

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we are going to be able
to create tastier foods,

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because we can measure
whether people actually like

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that sugar-reduced milkshake.

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And we can create healthier foods
without compromising taste,

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because we can measure the response
to different sweeteners

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and find the sweetener that gives
the response that's more similar

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to the response from sugar.

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And furthermore, we can just help
create healthier foods,

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because we can help understand
how we actually sense food

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in the first place.

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Which we know surprisingly little about.

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For example, we know
that there are those five basic tastes,

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but we strongly suspect
that there are more,

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and in fact, using our EEG setup,
we found evidence that fat,

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besides being sensed
by its texture and smell,

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is also tasted.

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Meaning that fat could be
this new sixth basic taste.

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And if we figure out
how our brain recognizes fat and sugar,

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and I'm just dreaming here,

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but could we then one day

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create a milkshake with zero calories
that tastes just like the real deal?

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Or maybe we figure out that we can't,

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because we subconsciously detect calories

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via our receptors
in our gastrointestinal tract.

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The future will show.

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Our conscious experience of food

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is just the tip of the iceberg
of our total sensation of food.

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And by studying this total sensation,

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conscious and subconscious alike,

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I truly believe that we can make
tastier and healthier foods for all.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)