Category Archives: Sensation

Taste Aversion

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The week after spring break, I returned back to school with some fresh vegetables, tortilla wraps, and my favorite Buffalo Light Ranch dressing that I had just recently discovered. As I live in an apartment and do not have a meal plan, bringing back with me these groceries that my parents so generously paid for was a huge bonus. I returned back Sunday afternoon and by dinner time could hardly wait to dig into my new items. I decided a sautéed vegetable wrap with a topping of my newly favorite dressing sounded beyond delicious. Needless to say, after I made it and scarfed it down, I was nothing less then pleased. This pleasure was short lived, however, as the next morning I woke up with terrible stomach pain. I was unable to eat and began to uncontrollably vomit. As it turns out I had contracted the stomach flu from my cousins at home who had also just gotten it.

Well after a long three days of no eating and too much sleeping, I finally felt better. However, I had a dilemma I faced every time I opened our refrigerator, I simply could no longer look at the vegetables or lovely buffalo ranch dressing that I devoured just days before. Every time I did I felt the nausea come over me again. I wanted so badly to crave this food as it was just sitting in my refrigerator going bad, but no matter how hard I tried I could not think of eating it again. It was then that I realized I was experiencing taste aversion, or the idea that humans are prone to have an aversion to foods if they become sick shortly after eating them. Since this was the last food item that I ate before becoming sick, my mind instantly associated the vegetables and dressing with my ill feeling of days prior. I became very sad to know that trying to eat these foods again would be a lost cause for a while and that I would have to throw them away. If only it had been something like brussels sprouts that I ate before getting the flu, then maybe I would not resent this taste aversion quality that we possess so much.

 

Forgetting and Examples of Attention Deficit

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In my life, there have been many occurrences in which encoding failure and rehearsal failure have been detrimental to me.  One experience happened at my house before college where I wanted to hide something that was completely trivial but important at the time since I was a kid.  I put the item in above a shelf high up where no one would see it.  Due to an encoding failure and forgetting it in nearly one minute, it led to unneeded anxiety and accusations.  Since I was a kid, I would blame my sister for taking something that wasn’t hers.  If the item was truly important there would be more attention given to it and I wouldn’t have forgotten it.  Since it was forgotten, it led to an embarrassing conclusion where my father found it and showed it to me before finally directly accusing my sister.  This would have led to me truly being ashamed of myself and regretting absence of mind when hiding it.  Fortunately, nothing major happened due to this.

Another instance of forgetting happened when I used to work.  I used to work at a garage where I would work on cars and pump gasoline into cars.  On a daily basis, I would deal with almost two hundred customers because gasoline and car maintenance is a necessary thing.  One example of forgetting comes from my boss quickly telling me what to do with a lot of noise from the environment.  Due to my lack of attention, some of the tasks asked of me would be forgotten.  This led to negative consequences and additional time wasted by my boss.  Ultimately this is an event I have learned from and will be attentive to for the rest of my life.  This would be an example of retrieval interference and encoding failure in the auditory sense.

In terms of Rehearsal Failure, there is another example from work that happened on a daily basis.  Most of my tasks included being very repetitive because it was a first job and car maintenance on multiple cars tends to include the same task.  With a car wheel, there is a hub, and the tire.  Every time the tire needs to be replaced, there is a machine inside of a garage that would need to be used.  It is called a mounting machine.  This includes using the machine with multiple processes to remove the broken tire and replacing the tire.  This process includes using four pedals and an arm that moves on the top of the tire.  These pedals and the arm have to be pressed in a very precise order and moving the arm is included in the order.  This means that remembering the order and methods is important for finishing the task quickly.  Of course I forget the order and the process because the directions given to me were not processed in my brain because of my attention deficit.  Forgetting these things and not paying attention leads to messing up the process, making a person wait longer, and negatively affecting my boss.  This would be considered a rehearsal failure and encoding failure during training.

More attention is needed for a lot of these technical processes.