Startled Disbelief: LUEE Episode 118: The Senses

On this episode of Life, the Universe & Everything Else, Gem, Ashlyn, and Lauren are joined by Mark Forkheim to talk about the sensory system and do some science along the way! Ashlyn, Lauren, and Gem try sensory isolation, and the episode features live experiments with sensory interference and a miracle fruit taste test.

Life, the Universe & Everything Else is a program promoting secular humanism and scientific skepticism that is produced by the Winnipeg Skeptics.

Note: Because this episode features live taste testing, it also features some unavoidable mouth sounds. These are bothersome to some people (like Ashlyn), so if you need to skip those segments they're generally confined to 1:00:15 through 1:25:40. (I tried to cut out as many as I could, but there's only so much I can do when we're tasting things on air.)

Links: Sense (Wikipedia) | Sensory nervous system (Wikipedia) | TRPV1 (Wikipedia) | Synesthesia (Wikipedia) | Tongue map (Wikipedia) | The Wine-Dark Sea: Color and Perception in the Ancient World (Clarkesworld Magazine) | This Picture Has No Red Pixels—So Why Do the Strawberries Still Look Red? (Motherboard) | The Genetics of Taste (Smithsonian) | Phenylthiocarbamide (Wikipedia) | Taste Perception and Eating Behavior:” They're in the Genes (Today's Dietitian) | Are you a Supertaster? (Precision Laboratories) | How does our sense of taste work? (PubMed Health) | The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts Across the Globe (RealClearScience) | Human sweet taste receptor mediates acid-induced sweetness of miraculin (PNAS) | Isolation tank (Wikipedia)