Emily McDonald

And what they found was that all of a sudden now these mice are drinking it like it's sweet.

And so what they found is that it's not the tea binding to the taste bud on your tongue that creates the perception of taste.

It's actually the receptor to the brain pathway.

And we know this, right?

Like some people love cilantro and some people think it tastes like soap.

It's the same cilantro.

We have the same, you know, taste buds, maybe a different combination, but it's really the pathways in our brain that's different.

And so depending on our brain and our programming, on our conditioning, on our genetics, on our past, we're actually perceiving things like taste or vision or color differently.

And I love color specifically because I remember when I started looking into that and really like looking into color and...

Knowing once you look into the science of it, you kind of start to realize like color actually doesn't even exist as a physical property of reality.

It's actually not even like quote unquote real.

And that I remember I was at South by Southwest speaking and I was this girl was just asking me about what I do.

And she had to take a moment to step back.

She's like, I don't think I can ask you another question for a second.

Because, yeah, when you realize like, well, it's something that we perceive as so inherently real.

like color, like we just assume it's real, that it exists.

It seems just like such a normal property of reality that we never question.

Like it actually does not even exist as color out there.

It exists as different wavelengths of light.

And then our brain kind of made up this color experience so that we could decipher between these different wavelengths of light.