Learn about why your taste buds aren’t the only part of your body that help you enjoy the flavor of food. Then, learn about the two major forces that determine what a group of people can accomplish, with physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall. Additional resources from Safi Bahcall: Pick up “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries” on Amazon — https://amazon.com Follow @SafiBahcall on Twitter — https://twitter.com/safibahcall Official Website — https://www.bahcall.com/ Subscribe to the New Books Network to hear our full interview with Safi Bahcall — https://newbooksnetwork.com/ The Taste Receptors Beyond Your Tongue by Grant Currin Sources: Taste receptors in the gastrointestinal system | Flavour — https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2044-7248-4-14 Your Gut Has Taste Receptors | ScienceDaily — https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070820175426.htm Gut feelings | Knowable Magazine — https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/health-disease/2018/gut-feelings T1R3 and gustducin in gut sense sugars to regulate expression of Na+-glucose cotransporter 1 | PNAS — https://www.pnas.org/content/104/38/15075 Subscribe to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Plus, Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to Curiosity Daily as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing! Just click or tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about why your taste buds aren’t the only part of your body that help you enjoy the flavor of food. Then, learn about the two major forces that determine what a group of people can accomplish, with physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall.
Additional resources from Safi Bahcall:
The Taste Receptors Beyond Your Tongue by Grant Currin
Sources:
Subscribe to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Plus, Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to Curiosity Daily as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing! Just click or tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/2-forces-determine-what-a-group-can-accomplish-w-safi-bahcall-and-the-taste-receptors-beyond-your-tongue
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about the taste receptors that exist deep within your internal organs. Then, you’ll learn about the two major forces that determine what a group of people can accomplish, with physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Taste receptors in stomach and intestines - Grant (Ashley)
I love eating. When you think about it, it’s kind of sad that you can only enjoy the flavor of a food while it’s in your mouth — once you swallow it, that’s it. It’s beyond your taste buds. ...Or is it? It turns out that you have way more taste cells in way stranger places than you ever imagined, and these mystery receptors are essential for your digestion and metabolism.
In the early 2000s, researchers at the University of Liverpool unearthed a surprise while studying how the gut absorbs nutrients. They found that the walls of the intestine are wired with the same glucose-sensing cells the tongue uses to detect sweetness. In other words, they pretty much found...taste buds. In the intestines. Once the scientific community caught wind of this, the race was on to find more taste receptors in surprising places.
Robert Margolskee is the director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, and a key figure in this taste receptor research. And according to him, scientists have found taste receptors, quote, “in the stomach, in the intestines, in the pancreas, in the lungs, in the central nervous system, in the testes, in the skin,” unquote.
What use do these organs have for taste buds? Scientists can’t be sure exactly what they do with every receptor, but the general idea is actually pretty simple. The taste buds in your mouth help guide your decisions about what to eat. Back before most people had easy access to salty, sugary, and fatty foods, humans’ ability to taste helped them choose the foods with the nutrients their bodies needed. The taste receptors in your gut don’t help you consciously make decisions, but they give your body important information it needs to digest the food you’ve decided to eat.
From the moment food enters your mouth until the second it goes out the other end, your digestive system pretty much has two jobs: break food down into simple molecules, and absorb those molecules. That’s where the taste receptors in the gut come in. Digestion is simple in the abstract, but it’s an extremely complicated process of chemical reactions and physical movement in reality. Many parts of digestion depend on your body knowing the location and concentration of nutrients throughout the digestive tract. Your internal taste receptors collect that vital information and use it to carefully orchestrate your digestion, metabolism, and appetite.
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Safi Bahcall 3 — Stake and outcome vs. perks of rank [4:35] (2 segments, long) (Cody)
Today’s guest will help you understand the two major forces at work in almost every team or organization. And understanding those forces can help you figure out what’s motivating both you and your colleagues, and maybe even help you achieve great things. Safi Bahcall is a physicist and a biotech CEO who took his company public, and he also worked for President Obama’s council of science advisors, among other accomplishments. He’s also the author of the new book “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.” Last week, he explained that you have two forces in a glass of water — namely, entropy and binding energy — and the balance of those forces determines whether that water is liquid or solid. Well in the same way, there are forces at work in groups of people that determines what that group can accomplish. Here’s a 2-in-1 lesson in physics and group behavior.
[CLIP 4:35]
That’s poetry, right? Like, when you take principles of physics and describe them to talk about how groups of people think about innovation and work together? Yeah, pretty awesome. Safi told us that you’re gonna get opposing groups in pretty much any organization, but that conflict between them is actually good. The trick is finding a leader and cultivating a culture that respects both sides and treats both with equal consideration. The best leaders manage the transfer between the people coming up with new ideas and the people playing it safe, and see them as equally important. There are many more takeaways in Safi Bahcall’s new book, “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.”
RECAP
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s first story was written by Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was scripted, produced, and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!