From the article: […] […] […] This is part of a series of articles that’s intended to help people who need to figure out what’s causing mysterious ailments.
From the article:
Rats would instantly associate nausea with whatever food they had most recently eaten, and had no problem doing so. If he made them sick after giving them Cheetos, they would learn to reject Cheetos forever. But the rats simply could not learn to associate their nausea with any other kind of stimulus. It didn’t matter if the stimulus was bright lights, or an annoying buzzer. No matter how many times Garcia flashed lights at them, the rats never learned to associate their nausea with the lights.
On the flipside, when he gave the rats electric shocks instead of exposing them to radiation, they would learn to be afraid of the lights and sounds. But no matter how many times he shocked them after eating, the rats would never learn to associate food or water with getting shocked.
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This was confusing to the behaviorists, but makes perfect sense if you think about evolution for even one second. In the real world, rats become nauseous when they eat spoiled food, so it’s important for a rat to associate nausea with things they recently ate. Any rat that doesn’t learn this will be dead, so eventually all rats are born prepared to make these food-nausea associations. Even though Garcia’s rats had been born in a laboratory and had never eaten a bit of ham left out in the sun for too long, they still came with an overwhelming bias to associate a feeling of nausea with whatever they most recently ate.
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Humans are also mammals, so we might have the same tendency. Maybe when we feel nauseous, or sick, or even just kind of weird, we assume it’s something we ate or drank.
Wikipedia thinks this is the case, claiming, “even something as obvious as riding a roller coaster (causing nausea) after eating the sushi will influence the development of taste aversion to sushi,” but doesn’t offer any citations. We suppose you could run this study on your own with a few sushi meals and a season’s pass to INSERT LOCAL THEME PARK.
People often suspect that their chronic illnesses have food triggers, different kinds of food or drink that will bring on an attack or generally make them feel like crap. But if our brains are hard-wired to pick out food-based explanations for feeling ill, maybe we tend to latch onto the idea of some food trigger causing our illness, even when food has nothing to do with it.
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Food can still make you sick, and there are for sure some real food triggers out there. But the lesson here is that your instincts will tell you that your random sickness is caused by what you ate, even if it’s actually caused by something completely different.
This is part of a series of articles that’s intended to help people who need to figure out what’s causing mysterious ailments.
From the article:
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[…]
[…]
This is part of a series of articles that’s intended to help people who need to figure out what’s causing mysterious ailments.