The Sensory Systems

I have been interested in the senses since early childhood (see article on my website entitled "Stinky, Stinky, Stinky"). As I grew older, some of those early childhood experiences motivated me to look for additional information related to the sensory systems, synesthesia, and sensory preference. As work related to Neurolinguistic Programming or NLP became available, it provided more food for thought. In the 1970's I began working on a Sensory Preference Assessment, which has been available since early 1980 and is free of charge on my website: www.arlenetaylor.org. Along the way there have been ongoing questions about the origin of sensory preference. Is it innate, learned, inherited, parts of all three or something quite different? Studies by Kaisu Keskitalo and colleagues in Finland have added some research data to this body of knowledge. Humans have an innate preference for sweet taste, but the degree of liking for sweet foods varies individually. Their research objective was to study a proportion of inherited sweet taste preference and to this end they performed a genome-wide linkage analysis to locate the underlying genetic elements in the genome. More on what they discovered—tomorrow.