Well, the childcare conundrum is momentarily moot. Aure is sick and expected to stay that way for a month or so. I’d have been paying for a month’s vacation for a sitter, so I s’pose it’s fine. (How long can I postpone new projects without going to debters prison or forgetting how to use a computer, I wonder? What is it I do again? Some sort of typing?) Speaking of babies, the Times has a lovely OpEd story about how babies grasp concepts like probability. Though the idea that the “remote block” might be especially astonishing or improbable to a baby made me giggle. Babies are really gullible, researchers of the world! They don’t know about Newtonian physics or that objects are attached to single words or any of the other abstractions we invented to get through the day…
I remember reading or maybe hearing fourth hand about a study in which they offered toddlers a variety of food items and found that they (the babies) regulated their eating according to which nutrients they needed, including munching on stuff like straight salt. However I can’t find anything on the internet about it (it’s not the giant FITS study), so it’s possible I dreamt it. In my memory there is an enormous glassy white room with a huge grid of tiny white bowls, each with a heap of some vividly colored substance. Diapered babies mill about poking their fingers into the bowls, while white coated researchers with clipboards watch through a diaphanous mirror. Yup, I’m pretty sure that’s the study. It was conducted on the set of THX 1138, if memory serves. Anyhow, the idea that taste and sensitivity to certain flavors, especially minerals, might be influenced by physiological requirements is really fascinating to me. (I think of this when the subject refuses to eat anything but pumpkin seeds for a day and a half.) I know that the intensity of salt taste is mediated at least in part by aldosterone, a hormone that has something to do with sodium and potassium balance, water retention and blood pressure—or something. Theoretically one should be able to trust one’s salt cravings. (Not that I’ve ever dreamed of not dumping salt where ‘ere I please. As a nephrologist I once knew used to ask, what else are your kidneys for?) The idea that taste might be more trustworthy than we think (are conditioned to think?) pleases me. Though I imagine it only works in a fairly pure context. I bet the gustatory feedback loops associated with particular minerals could be confounded by more powerful tastes like MSG or maybe cravings for things like sugar… Huh, here’s a story of salt taste abnormality, hypothesizing a relationship with blood pressure, and something about salt taste and circadian rhythm. And wow, a study correlating high serum aldosterone with greater hearing sensitivity. The abstract doesn’t say much about pitch, but is this why my salt craving self can still at age 36 hear those horrid teen repellent noises? And how does that relate to diurnal cortisol levels and general alertness and reflexes, including stuff like a tendency to startle, I wonder? Too bad no one wants me to do a science fair project. (I sure wish I had to time to work on The Lived Body project, a sort of science-fair-project-making device Mitsu and I have been talking about for more than a year.) I wonder if there are studies relating this in more detail to other minerals. Zinc deficiency is associated with anorexia, though it’s unclear why. Hmm, some case reports of taste disorders from zinc deficiency. Boy, is this reading ever making me hungry. How about a plate of back yard garden tomatoes?
