The Pumpkin Spice Neuroscientist
I’ve been reflecting recently on my journey as an informal educator. My passion is thinking, talking, and writing about the science of everyday life. “The unexamined life is not worth living.” So said Socrates (supposedly) and so say I. Let’s pull out the magnifying lens and examine everything! Why do we do and say things? Why do we make certain decisions? What makes us different from each other? Why does one person like and dislike certain things and others disagree? Why do some people like pumpkin spice or think fall is the best season and others disagree? And so on.
So on my quest to share the things I know and pursue even more questions, there came a pivotal moment in 2015. I’d had my Ph.D. for a decade at that point and stood in front of a roomful of 20-year-olds at least once a day to ask and answer questions. But this was the moment I began publishing some of my questions and answers in a public forum, as an invited contributor on HuffPost. One of the first articles I wrote was The Joy of Pumpkin Spice: The Science Behind Loving Fall. I was focused on all the neurobiological reasons why your brain loves fall and thought I did a decent job of introducing and explaining some things, but I wasn’t really all in on the pumpkin spice thing yet.
A couple years later, a CNN correspondent found that article and reached out to me to interview me about pumpkin spice. That was just one component of my original article, but my Ph.D. thesis work was in olfactory physiology and I actually am an expert on flavor, taste, smell and memory. Plus I love to bake. So this was a natural fit. What is ‘pumpkin spice,’ anyway? And why do we crave it? became a front page CNN read. And I became the scientist that everyone reached out to each fall.
I enjoy writing and talking about many, many aspects of daily life. But perhaps due to its joyful nature, the science of pumpkin spice has been a topic I’ve been asked about most and I look forward to returning to it each fall. I’ll blog again about pumpkin spice before the fall is over, and then we’ll take that same fun, joyful approach to neuroscience into some other topics.
