Dr. Charles Zuker: The Biology of Taste Perception & Sugar Craving
Huberman Lab
Scicomm Media
4.8 • 26.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2022
⏱️ 137 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Uberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. |
| 0:08.8 | I'm Andrew Uberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and |
| 0:12.3 | Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Dr. Charles Zucker. |
| 0:17.4 | Dr. Zucker is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of neuroscience at Columbia University School of Medicine. |
| 0:24.9 | Dr. Zucker is one of the world's leading experts in |
| 0:27.5 | perception that is how the nervous system converts physical stimuli in the world into events within the nervous system that we come to understand as our sense of smell, our sense of taste, our sense of vision, our sense of touch, and our sense of hearing. |
| 0:42.9 | Dr. Zucker's lab is responsible for a tremendous amount of pioneering and groundbreaking work in the area of perception. |
| 0:49.2 | For a long time his laboratory worked on vision defining the very receptors that allow for the conversion of light into signals that the rest of the eye in the brain can understand. |
| 0:59.2 | In recent years his laboratory is focused mainly on the perception of taste and indeed his laboratory is responsible for discovering many of the taste receptors leading to our perception of things like |
| 1:10.0 | sweetness sourness bitterness saltiness and umami that is savouriness in food. |
| 1:16.4 | Dr. Zucker's laboratory is also responsible for doing groundbreaking work on the sense of thirst. |
| 1:21.2 | That is how the nervous system determines whether or not we should ingest more fluid or reject fluids that are offered to us. |
| 1:28.7 | A key feature of the work from Dr. Zucker's laboratory is that it bridges the brain and body. |
| 1:33.7 | As you'll soon learn from today's discussion his laboratory has discovered a unique set of sugar sensing neurons that exist not just within the brain, |
| 1:42.4 | but a separate set of neurons that sense sweetness and sugar within the body and that much of the communication between the brain and body leading to our seeking of sugar is below our conscious detection. |
| 1:53.7 | Dr. Zucker has received a large number of prestigious awards and appointments as a consequence of his discoveries in neuroscience. |
| 1:59.9 | He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. |
| 2:06.0 | He is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for those of you that are not familiar with the so-called HHMI, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. |
| 2:14.2 | Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators are selected on an extremely competitive basis. |
| 2:19.4 | And indeed they have to come back every five years and prove themselves worthy of being reappointed as Howard Hughes investigators. |
| 2:27.2 | Dr. Zucker has been a Howard Hughes investigator since 1989. |
| 2:31.6 | What all that means for you as a viewer and or listener of today's podcast is that you are about to learn about the nervous system and its ability to create perceptions in particular the perception of taste and sugar sensing from the world's expert on perception and taste. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Scicomm Media, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Scicomm Media and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.