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A New Leaf for the Looking Glass 2026/27

Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
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Biology: Does the Loss of Smell and Sight Affect Taste Perception?


The following study was carried out by Lokan Bavisi, L6 (20bavisil@students.watfordboys.org)

Abstract:

This investigation explored the effect of sight and smell on taste specifically with soft drinks with 16-17 year olds. 20 volunteers tasted the four soft drinks (Coca Cola, Orange Zero, Lemon Zero and Tango apple) with varying impairments - visual and olfactory, visual, olfactory and no impairments. After each sample they were each asked to identify the flavours and the mean correct identification score was 1.45 with the double impairment. This is significantly lower than the expected result of 3 and through Chi-square analysis the probability of the difference being due to chance was determined to be >0.1%. This allowed us to reject the null hypothesis that there is no significant difference in the number of drinks identified with different impairments. However there were some anomalous results as seen with participants “6” and “17” who correctly identified all the soft drinks with a double impairment and participant “18” who failed to identify any soft drinks with just a visual impairment which differs from the mean score of 2.65 for that category.  This supports previous research into the interrelationships of the senses as seen in the 2010 study - Influence of Smell Loss on Taste Function(1). 


Literature Review:

Taste is a chemical sense that is perceived by taste buds on the tongue and humans have the ability to perceive five tastes of sweet,salty,sour,umami and bitter(1). This is a vital faculty for all of the five sub-categories of vertebrates: animals, birds, reptiles, fish and amphibians, as well as insects who are invertebrates as it aids in nutrition. 


In 2013 Cadbury changed the shape of its best selling product the Cadbury Dairy Milk(3) from multiple rectangular sections to multiple curved and bulbous sections. Succeeding this change many consumers of Cadbury Dairy Milk complained that the new bar was sweeter, however Cadbury never changed the formula of their bars. This brings the question as to why people reported a change in taste. It’s all due to the shape of the new bar and how neurological activity can affect the perception of chemicals. Humans associate the rounder shape with a softer and sweeter taste and the sharp rectangular shapes as harsh and subsequently bitter tastes which then caused the complaints of increased sweetness without a change in the recipe.


(3)


This raises the question how do we distinguish between those foods and beverages; the answer is by flavour. Flavour is created in the nasal cavity (2) and the majority of what we consider “taste” in layman’s terms is roughly 70-90% flavour(4). When aroma particles from substances in the buccal cavity travel upwards past the soft palate into the nasal cavity and are detected by olfactory receptors which then send an electrical signal to the brain, specifically the gustatory cortex flavour is created. Due to this people who suffer from an olfactory disorder (OD) often report impairment to their smell and taste (2). 


I have specifically chosen soft drinks as they often have similar levels of the five tastes yet are perceived to be completely different due to the impact of vision and olfactory response on the taste making them the perfect example for my experiment. 


Methodology:

A group of 20 male subjects all aged 16-17 years old took part in the experiment. They received 50ml of each of my chosen soft drinks: Coca Cola, Orange Zero, Lemon Zero and Tango apple. They tried to identify the soft drinks with visual and olfactory impairments.


Results and Conclusions:

The results showed significantly that under both visual and olfactory impairments the participants struggled to correctly identify the soft drinks. This greatly supports the initial hypothesis that sight and smell have an impact on the perception of taste especially with soft drinks as their sweetness, sourness, bitterness, savouriness, and saltiness are very similar.

The graph represents how many soft drinks were identified (y-axis) under differing impairments


Overall, the experiment provided evidence of the substantial impact of sight and smell on taste which is consistent with biological understanding yet some of the results may have been achieved through luck. Further investigation with more similar samples are required to determine the full impact of sight and smell. 

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