Emily McDonald
speaker
2,071 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 2 Jun
Emily McDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Know Thyself · E192 - Emily McDonald: The Neuroscience of Transforming Yourself · 28 Apr 2026
podcast
And specifically, the taste one kind of sticks with me because there was this study or this experiment where it's called like the bitter tea experiment, where they would have these mice kind of drink this tea that was very bitter and they wouldn't drink it.
But yeah, exactly.
And so they wouldn't drink it, right, because it was bitter.
So they wouldn't drink it.
But what they would do then is they actually kind of made this genetic switch where they didn't change the taste buds in these mice tongues.
What they changed was the wiring, the path from the taste bud to kind of the area in the brain where we decipher taste.
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.
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