If you love spicy food and you are about to eat spicy food, your brain responds to make the experience more enjoyable. However, if you expect to dislike spicy food, your brain will focus more on the pain, according to a new study published today in PLOS Biology.
Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and East China Normal University collaborated on a study to explore the power of suggestions and biases on how humans interpret sensory information.
In the study, 47 people with different tastes for spicy food tasted liquefied salsas (mild, medium and hot) while their brain activity was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. The researchers gave participants suggestions (visual pictures) about how spicy the sauce would be to see how their expectations affected their experience. However, sometimes participants were told the spiciness would be mild but were given the hot version instead and vice versa.
The research team found that people who liked the spiciness in the sauces had higher pleasurable experiences because of the suggestion that the sauce would be hot, and the increased positive expectations activated brain areas associated with learning and information integration. People who did not like the spiciness developed negative expectations, and the suggestion of heat caused more intense pain. The visual suggestion of increased heat activated brain areas linked to low-level sensory processes and pain.
“We observed that the brain reacts to the same suggestions and the same sauces very differently if you like the spiciness of the sauces versus if you don’t,” said Kenneth Kishida, Ph.D., associate professor of translational neuroscience at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and senior co-corresponding author of the paper.
“It was not just brain activity about pleasure and pain,” Kishida said. “Rather, our expectations also appear to prepare our brain to learn about very different aspects of the experience.”
Kishida said these findings are related to the neural mechanisms of the placebo effect.
“This research shows how hedonic expectations (good and bad) can shape how people perceive reality and provides new insights into the mechanisms of pleasure and pain perception.”
Read the full press release from PLOS Biology.
Media contact: Myra Wright, mgwright@wakehealth.edu