A psychologist Paul Rozin came to UF to give a talk on the smell and taste seminar last week. He started off by talking about the importance of first describing phenomena in contrary to explaining them. I have forgotten about looking for novel phenomena that were not properly described in the literature! I have been working too hard to model and explain things, and not paid attention to the spirit of description.
The reason he brought this up is because he is kind of non-mainstream psychologist. Many of his research ends up not being able to be published. According to him, this is mostly because they are not subject of main stream academia.
The main topic was in human, there are many things that should be naturally avoided, but you learn to like it later in life; such as hotness (almost no animal likes hot food, except for maybe parrots), bitterness, sadness, pain, scariness, disgusting blue cheese, etc. A new born babies would not like any of these, and at some age, perhaps due to social context, they develop a preference for them!
The seminar was hilarious, and it was definitely the most entertaining and inspiring talks in 2 years for me.
P.S. He also talked about his experience in one of the best restaurants in the world, El Bulli in Spain.
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