The Justice

Media Credit: Adina Paretzky A rat is offered a piece of food that it typically avoids as part of a research effort to examine taste aversions.

Prof. Donald Katz (PSYC) believes that his extensive research on conditioned tastes in rats has the potential to lead to a deeper understanding of currently unexplained human taste aversion to seemingly random tastes.

Katz is conducting research in conjunction with three other members of the Brandeis Life Science faculty: Paul Miller (BIOL), Jozsef Fiser (PSYC) and Susan Birren (BIOL).

The general concept behind the research explores whether rats can be influenced by other rats to overcome their taste aversion. Katz presented a hungry rat with raw cocoa, a food whose taste, according to Katz, rats tend to dislike.

He discovered that if a rat were deprived of food, it would eventually become hungry enough to eat something that it would not normally eat.

His research then revealed that when a second rat smelled the cocoa on the hungry rat's breath, it became more inclined to choose raw cocoa over another unappetizing taste.

Katz explained that his research is about survival mechanisms at the most basic level. However, the reason Katz began this research was due to his fascination with how the brain causes social behavior.

Katz is not very interested in the clinical aspect of the work. Despite the fact that this is not the motivation behind his research, there are some similarities between human biology and rat biology, and thus his research may have some practical applications.

What Katz is most interested in are the chemical reactions and coding processes in the brain and their implications on social behavior. Some of his goals in the research are coming to fruition.

In an e-mail to the Justice, Yaihara Fortis-Santiago, a graduate student who has worked with Professor Katz on taste aversion for the past two years, said, "We are understanding how [humans] perceive hazardous flavors" and how the human brain "[codes] for what we learn through our mouths."

The practical applications that could arise from his research, Katz believes, involve primarily child cancer patients and new mothers, because unexplained learned taste aversions often occur in both these groups. This is especially problematic for child cancer patients, because malnourishment can occur when a child suddenly refuses to eat a food that once was a staple of his or her diet.

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