Essentials: The Biology of Taste Perception & Sugar Craving | Dr. Charles Zuker

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Charles Zucker. Charles, thank you so much for joining me today.

My pleasure. I want to ask you about many things related to taste and gustatory perception, but maybe to start off, and because you've worked on a number of different topics in neuroscience, not just taste, how should the world and people think about perception, how it's different from sensation, and what leads to our experience of life in terms of vision, hearing, taste, etc.? The world is made of real things. You know, this here is a glass and this is a cord and this is a microphone. But the brain is only made of neurons that only understand electrical signals.

So how do you transform that reality into nothing that electrical signals that now need to represent the world? And that process is we can is what we can operationally define as perception. In the senses, let's say olfactory, odor, taste, vision, you know, we can very straightforwardly separate detection. from perception. Detection is what happens when you take a sugar molecule, you put it in your tongue, and then a set of specific cells now sense that sugar molecule.

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