‘Why don’t I remember that?’

Could part of the top-secret CocaCola formula be a sense of nothingness? American tycoon Warren Buffett has famously said that the drink lacks “taste memory” and that’s why one can consume “one of these at 9 o’clock, 11 o’clock, 5 o’clock... (and not) get sick of it”, while “You can’t do that with cream soda, root beer, orange, grape.”

What really is taste memory?

For a while now, researchers have been studying how flavour and shortterm memory affect food consumption.

How long-term memory interacts with food choices has been the subject of research for much longer. But how does taste influence working memory? One hypothesis suggested that snacks might be easier to return to because they are usually consumed while the mind is distracted.

A study by Shirley Xue Li Lim, a postdoctoral scholar at France’s National Institute of Agricultural Research (INRAE), suggests that this is not the case. Her research, published in Nature in May 2022, showed that participants reliably recalled specific tastes, even while distracted.

Suzanne Higgs, who researches the psychology of appetite at Birmingham University, offers hints at what the true source of a sense of nothingness or lack of taste memory could be.

In a research study conducted in 2012 and published in the Springer journal Current Obesity Reports, she explored the phenomenon of “poor food memory” and how it affects consumption.

The consumption of certain foods, in particular those high in saturated fats and sugar, may impair memory, potentially creating a vicious cycle that promotes overeating, her report states,

“Long-term consumption of a high saturated fat/sugar diet by laboratory rats impaired hippocampal-dependent memory processes, which would be predicted to impair food memories and lead to overconsumption of food.”

Could the sense of nothingness, then, be traceable to sugar levels so high that they impair certain memory processes in the brain? That might be worth thinking about, before your next sip.