How does your brain react to that hot sauce?
Ihor Butko/Alamy
Anticipating pleasure or pain before tasting hot sauce appears to influence the brain’s response to spicy flavors.
“This has a broader meaning beyond spicy food,” says Yi Luo of East China Normal University. “Understanding how positive and negative expectations influence cognition can inform approaches in medicine, such as increasing the placebo effect in treatment.”
Luo and her colleagues recruited 47 volunteers, about half of whom liked spicy food and half who disliked it, to receive the squirts…
