Among the content videos tied to chapter 1, I found the video on taste & smell to be particularly interesting. In terms of learning, I learnt a lot more in the aforementioned videos as they introduced more concepts (especially in biology. For eg. the nervous system) that I was not previously exposed to. The other videos mostly covered content that chemistry majors (like myself) are already familiar with. However, it was interesting to see how these basic concepts were presented in such an engaging manner in the videos so I still enjoyed watching them even though they were prior knowledge!

In the video titled “Taste & Smell: Crash Course A&P #16”, I learnt that the sense of taste (gustation) and smell (olfaction) are chemical senses. The process of us smelling and tasting things can be fully attributed to detecting the molecules around us. One very interesting learning point is that each olfactory neuron has receptors for only one kind of smell (aka one chemical). In fact, it is the different combinations of some 40 million olfactory receptors that allow us to be able to identify over 10,000 different smells. Before watching the video, I had a much simpler assumption on how our sense of smell worked. I never would have thought that our olfactory receptors were specific to only one type of chemical. It is interesting how vast the possibilities of combinations can be. The video also mentioned that the typical tongue diagrams that depict the distribution of taste buds are wrong! This came as a surprise to me because I never had doubts about those tongue diagrams. I remember referring to such diagrams when I was younger and I would consciously concentrate bitter foods at the tip of my tongue because the “bitter zone” is located towards the back of the tongue. I don’t remember if I arrived at any conclusion back then, but I guess now I know that it shouldn’t have much of an impact on taste since research has shown that variations in sensitivity around the tongue and insignificant! Maybe I will test this out again the next time I get my hands on extra bitter/sour foods!

In week 1, we had gone through a workshop on coffee brewing. Overall the workshop greatly broadened my horizons in the field of coffee. I never understood and appreciated the wide range of drinks available at cafes (eg, starbucks) because I never looked into different types of coffee and coffee-related concepts/processes such as brewing. Through the workshop, I learnt a lot about the multitude of factors that affect the eventual taste of a type of coffee. These include the type of coffee bean, the brewing time/temperature, grind size and the ratio of coffee grounds to water etc. The most striking thing to me was the significance of brewing and how there are so many variations in the brewing process. The same type of coffee bean will produce coffee of different tastes if brewed for different periods of time. For example, bitterness is achieved by brewing for a longer period of time. Before the workshop, I had thought that it was just the type of coffee bean and amount of milk/sugar that determined the taste. Now I realise how complex coffee making actually is and how much skill and knowledge goes into making the perfect cup of coffee!