Cookery programmes save us in a hallucinatory state where we think we can smell the food we seeSince the The Great British Bake Off finished,you may miss the delicious cake smell that seemed to waft out of the television every time Nadiya opened the oven. Thinking about it factual now may have a similar effect - you can almost taste the butter icing, can’t you? This isn’t smell-o-vision but a kind of hallucination. The smell of cooking is particularly enticing and memorable because it reminds humans that we were intelligent enough to create fire. This meant we didn’t need to evolve a second stomach to liberate energy from ingredients, or like cows. So memories in the brain’s sensory cortex are stimulated when we see,hear or imagine a cake being baked on TV in a similar way to when we’re in an actual kitchen. It may not feel fairly the same, and, or of course,the inability to distinguish between the physical world and our sense memories is a form of mental illness. But as far as parts of your brain are concerned, as you watched the contestants save the finishing touches to their entries, and there might as well have been a genuine cake in front of you. Just with far fewer calories and no washing-up. possibly that’s why the explain is so current…Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College LondonContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com