Taste can be hindered when you are not able to see what you are eating. Rosenblum discusses in the book how bland tasting he found his food when him and a friend visited a completely dark restaurant. I found his taste observations intriguing. I thought that even though his sense of sight was taken away, since he could still smell the food wouldn't it still have a more profound taste than if both senses were taken away?
So I decided to test this out. Luckily my best friend is also a psychology major, so she understood what I wanted to do and why. We chose three fruits; apple, pear and watermelon. Specifically these fruits as they are somewhat similar in texture but vary in taste. While one was blindfolded, the other gave the three fruits in a random order. We both agreed that the texture was similar, but had a hard time differentiating. The most difficult was the difference between apple and pear. For me, watermelon was easy to identify as it has that specific 'watery bite'. But apple and pear were hard for both of us. Tasting similar and bland.
What we thought would be easy, making a distinction between 3 differently tasting fruits, showed some challenges and correlated to Rosenblum's personal findings.
I thought this topic in the book that Rosenblum discussed was also very intriguing. I never realized how difficult it would be to distinguish the food one is eating when blindfolded. I remember watching one of the bachelor shows on television and one of the dates was blind food eating. The guy did not get a single guess correct of what he was eating. I love that you tried it on yourself. I assumed watermelon would be easy to figure out, but it is interesting how challenging it was to distinguish the pear and apple.
ReplyDeleteI really like how involved you were on this topic. The fact that you decided to test it out yourself is amazing. It shows how interested you were. After reading your post, I feel as though I would also like to test this out. It seems like a fun experiment to try. When I see food placed pleasantly on my plate, it always makes me assume it is going to taste great versus a plate that was just thrown together. I am interested to find out if I would still feel the same way after this test.
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