The BBB Society will be hosting a "Magic Berries" charity event to raise money for the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Alzheimer's Association on Friday, February 10th in Huntsman 270 from 4 - 6 pm.
facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/106585796133311/
For only $3 you will receive a magic berry, a variety of foods to test its effects, and a lesson by Neuroscientist Professor, Dr. Mike Kaplan, explaining how the magic berry works. Make sure to stop by to try out a berry that makes sour and bitter foods taste sweet! For more information about how exactly these berries work, read the entry below:
Sometimes, I feel like we are all robots. I’m not having a nervous breakdown or trying to start any sort of philosophical discussion. No, I’m merely commenting on the fact that the human brain is a miraculous contraption, an intricate web of axons and dendrites, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, whose function and precision more than closely resembles that of a computer. Moreover, if you tweak the human brain and its “subservient” body parts, you make the human body do some pretty cool things.
Before I get into the “juice” of this article (you’ll get that pun later), a brief overview of the gustatory system (how we taste things) is in order. Lets say you put something sweet in your mouth, like a lollipop. As soon as the candy touches your tongue, special taste molecules, called “tastants” trigger sweet receptors embedded in taste receptor cells in your taste buds. Once triggered, the receptors, called G-Protein Coupled Receptors, recruit a G-Protein subunit and trigger, with the help of a few more enzymes and kinases, an enormous signal cascade. There are millions of these taste receptor cells all over the tongue, and its up to the brain to receive these millions of signals, sift through them, and tell you that whatever is in your mouth tastes sweet. Everything I just wrote is a gross oversimplification, but hey, it gets the point across (and who really wants to think that much about what they’re eating anyway!).
Now that you understand how we taste sweet things, you can understand why humans are robots. One word, my friend: miraculin. Miraculin is a glycoprotein (a protein attached to a sugar) found in the berry Synsepalum dulcificum. When ingested, miraculin will, for up to about an hour, make anything you eat taste sweet. You can try it yourself. Just go to the store, buy some “magic berries,” pop them in your mouth and then suck on a lime – sweetest treat you’ve ever had. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why humans are robots. One tweak, and it is possible to alter the very way we perceive the world. We are not enlightened individuals, paving our own destiny, but slaves to our hard wiring.
I’m just kidding, but here’s how miraculin tricks the brain into tasting everything as sweet, it very simply and pretty cool: miraculin, when ingested, binds to the sweet tastant receptors I described to you two paragraphs ago. The miraculin does not, however, trigger the receptors upon binding. For reasons still poorly understood, it requires the binding of another type of tastant, lets say the H+ ions of a sour food, to activate the receptor and initiate a signal cascade.
If that’s too much science for you, think of it like this: “miraculin sits on your tastebuds and screams "sweet incoming" every time it sees sour. And the tastebuds buy it.”
(http://www.quora.com/How-does-Flavor-Tripping-with-the-protein-miraculin-work)
