Kai Qin Chan, a doctoral candidate at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands found that even water tastes sweeter when you’re in love.

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However, not every emotion heightens the senses. Jealousy did not bring out bitter or sour tastes, despite predictions it may.

Kai Qin Chan found these results by letting students rate the taste of a sweet-and-sour gummy or bittersweet chocolates after writing about a romantic experience, a jealous experience or a neutral topic. He found that students who wrote about a romantic experience rated the both the candies and chocolates sweeter than those who wrote about a negative jealous experience or a neutral one.

And once again, even writing about love made water taste sweeter- a substance that really has no taste at all.

The Huffington Post reports, “the finding is important for two reasons, Chan said. First of all, the fact that even water tastes sweeter when people think about love reveals that the emotion isn’t acting on the taste receptors on the tongue, making them more sensitive to sugar. There’s no sugar in the water, after all. Instead, the effect must arise from the brain’s processing of the taste information.

Second, the lack of an effect caused by jealousy reveals language alone doesn’t influences the senses — metaphors have to go deeper. Chan and his colleagues suspect that embodied metaphors develop only after a lot of experience. The linkage of love with the physical experience of sweetness may go back to infancy, he said. Babies start their lives drinking breast milk or formula, both of which are sweet, and may learn to associate that taste with their mother’s love.”

What an interesting finding! Wow, love definitely turns your entire world around.

Article from: The Huffington Post