The journal Cortex published a study by researchers from Washington University in the States and University College London in the UK which says that people with dementia cannot correctly identify flavours.
Researchers analyzed the tastes of people with Pick’s disease, a neurological disease that results from semantic dementia. All participants were healthy but had semantic dementia.
They were asked to taste a variety of candies and then asked to identify the flavours in addition to judging the validity of some taste associations.
Although all participants were able to say they liked the taste, none could recognize them and none could say whether the associations were appropriate or not, such as vanilla and pickle.
This discovery clearly shows that the brain plays an important role in food preferences. In addition, we understand a little better how the taste mechanism works which is also linked to brain function.