Radiolab: Taste and Touch

**Tiffany Hansen** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Tiffany Hansen, intro Brian here this Friday. Time for us to spend a bit of time with our colleagues from Radiolab. It's a show that talks science and philosophy and human stories and makes them feel a little bit like music. The Radiolab hosts are Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser, and they're here with two questions. First of all, what is the sweetest thing you have ever tasted? And second, what gives you goosebumps? Not like, I'm cold goosebumps, but like the chills, right?
Hearing a piece of music that maybe stops you in your tracks. Those are two questions that are at the center of a live show called The Sweetest Thing and The Holy Shiver, which Radiolab hosts Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are bringing to the Tribeca Festival on Tuesday, June 9th. So coming up this week, coming this coming week, we'll talk with Lulu and Latif about what they have planned for the event and also we'll open up the phones. So Lulu, Latif, welcome to the show.

**Lulu Miller** (1:10)
Hey, Tiffany, nice to be here.

**Tiffany Hansen** (1:12)
Nice to talk to you guys again. Okay.
And listeners, yeah, we'd love to have you in this conversation as well. The sweetest thing you've ever tasted, what makes you shiver with awe? 212-433-9692. You can call us, you can text us at that number. Okay, you guys are going to be at the Tribeca Festival on June 9th. What are people walking into? Because this isn't really like a listening to just a taping of the show, right?

**Lulu Miller** (1:40)
Yeah.
So Radiolab has been around for over 20 years. We love to delight the ears, but we wanted to try something different. We're doing this show that's really an experiential delight for taste and for touch. We have all kinds of surprises. We have tastings, we have live music. We're going to be trying to create goosebumps. We're going to try to move you to the degree that it registers on your skin. We're not sure if we'll pull it off, but yeah, it's this mix of focusing on other senses.

**Tiffany Hansen** (2:16)
Tastings like food tastings or what do you? Can you tell us maybe without exactly giving away too much?

**Latif Nasser** (2:24)
Well, I'll just tell you the genesis of the project and then that'll maybe I think help explain and motivate what the tastings are doing. So basically, the taste portion of this started with a question that I got from my kids. We were, they were in the back of the car and we were listening to the U2 song, The Sweetest Thing, if you know it, great song.
They just asked me, they were like, well, what is the sweetest thing? What actually is the sweetest thing that you could eat? And I was like, I have no idea.
And that then sent me kind of on a quest to try to find what actually is the sweetest thing that you can eat. And there is a kind of, the chemists have figured out a scale to measure sweetness and to rank sweet things against each other. But the scale is a little bit controversial. People think that it doesn't quite correspond to the way we taste and experience sweetness. So for this show, we're bringing a bunch of people who are experts in sweetness, including Claire Safitz and Sam Senevaratna, amazing sweet dessert people. And they're gonna help us, and the audience too, gonna help us taste a bunch of things to be like, is this really the sweetest thing?

**Tiffany Hansen** (3:48)
Sweet experts, sweetness experts.

**Latif Nasser** (3:50)
That's right.

**Tiffany Hansen** (3:52)
Listeners, what is the sweetest thing you've ever tasted?
212-433-9692 Latif. I'm gonna throw maybe a wrench, and say, talking about the sweetest thing I've ever, I was thinking about this. What's the sweetest thing I've ever tasted? And I'm gonna say that it changes over time, because, for example, I have in my life said, I'm not gonna eat as much sugar anymore. And so then I cut way back on my sugar intake. And then when I go and have a bite of cantaloupe, I think that is the sweetest thing I have ever tasted. And so it's relative. And so maybe there isn't an answer. Maybe there isn't an answer.

**Latif Nasser** (4:36)
So this is an ongoing fight between the chemists and the psychologists.
We've talked to so many different experts, including psychologists, who basically argued that sweetness, yeah, we taste sweetness differently. We taste sweetness differently between people. My sweetness might not be the same as your sweetness. Something that is too sweet for me is not as sweet for you or whatever. But then also even within ourselves, like whatever nutrients you're deficient in or whatever you've been, whatever you grew up eating, whatever you've been eating recently, just as you said, that there is this huge range of what we experience as sweetness and it's, yeah, it gets very philosophical very quickly of what even is sweetness? What do we mean when I say something sweet and when you say something sweet, are we even saying the same thing?