Why We Always Have Room for Dessert: A Nerdoscientist’s Take on ISN
I wasn’t at all familiar with the International Society of Neurogastronomy (ISN) before this summer, so when my friend and colleague Rachel Herz invited me to be a speaker, I was both honored and nervous. I’ve admired Rachel’s career and science for years, and over the past year I’ve been lucky to get to know her better as an amazing person, scientist, writer, and speaker. So when she asked me to contribute, of course I said yes.
Rachel had enjoyed my talk at AChemS earlier this year, where I explored sensory perception and how AI (particularly large language models) can help us study the human experience, and she encouraged me to do something similar for ISN. The challenge: she also wanted me to weave in perceptions and choice. That felt like a tall order.
Enter: The Cookie Stomach
Coincidentally, at the STAR Nudge conference earlier this year, over dinner with Han-Seok Seo and Thomas Hummel, I shared my kids’ theory about the “cookie stomach”, that magical extra space you somehow have for dessert, no matter how full you are. My kids informed me, the mom with a PhD that focused on vagal innervation of the stomach and GI tract, that there were in fact, different stomach for different types of foods. Such that their “dinner stomach” fills quickly while their cookie stomach remains sadly empty. Han-Seok and Thomas encouraged me to explore it further as it was quite amusing. And so, I ended up shaping my ISN talk around it.
I, surprisingly, ended up as the closing speaker for the event. Two days of brilliant talks later, it turned out to be the perfect way to wrap things up, as I feel I was able to bring in moments from the other speakers’ presentations as a sort of culminating closing.
Day 1 speakers at ISN
Highlights from the Conference
What makes ISN unique is its diversity of perspectives: chefs, clinicians, professors, engineers, and yes, nerdoscientists. A few moments that stood out to me:
Kai Zhao (fellow Monell alum) approached smell from an engineering perspective, showing how airflow in the nasal cavity shapes olfactory perception. Think nasal plugs with straws or Breathe Right patches, like eyeglasses for smell. (And I’m seriously thinking we should partner on a survey of what perfumers and chefs may do to up their taste and smell game.)
Clare de March explored the sheer range of human olfaction, including a fascinating study on our ability to smell tears.
Anne Marie Torregrossa spoke about kids, veggies, and tannins in saliva and how chemistry helps us accept bitter tastes.
Dana Small gave a beautiful talk on the “two roads of reward” in food choice: the high road of taste and flavor, and the low road of physiological signals. Her discussion of sensory imagery and how some people can vividly imagine a smell while others can’t, really stuck with me.
Kyle Burger (another Monellian) won quote of the week: “Theories are like toothbrushes, everyone has one and no one likes to use someone else’s.” I’ve been borrowing that line for discussing emotion theory debates ever since.
Thomas Hummel captivated, as always, with retronasal olfaction and amazing videos of the nasal cavity in action.
Talks on aging and dementia from Claire Murphy and Lauren Roberson were deeply moving, especially Lauren’s framing of dementia-related feeding decline in terms that parallel work I’ve seen consumer experience research: cognition, physiology, psychology, environment, culture.
Chris Simons applied behavioral economics through discrete choice experiments. So close to my own work with MaxDiff and implicit measures that I couldn’t stop nodding along.
Day 2 speakers and announcement of the chef challenge winner.
My Talk: Cookie Stomach Meets AI
As the closer, I used the cookie stomach as a playful but serious entry point into perception, choice, and bias.
I argued that in sensory science we often try to treat humans like machines, but we’re not. No matter how quantitative we get, we can never fully capture subjective experience (cue Thomas Nagel’s classic “what is it like to be a bat?”).
I connected this to how emotions both shape perception and drive behavior, think carbs, comfort, and repetitive habits.
And I showed how AI can play a role: while LLMs can miss the mark when asked to “imagine” something like trying durian for the first time, they shine in clustering consumer language to reveal cognitive strategies and behavioral frameworks that help predict food choices.
The talk seemed to resonate. Over the next week, at ISN and even at Pangborn, people stopped me in the street or in restaurants to tell me about their own dessert stomachs (and one person even had a wine stomach).
Special thanks to Ha and Emily for capturing these moments.
Reflections
I walked into ISN nervous, unsure how I’d fit among such an extraordinary roster. I walked out feeling energized, inspired, and grateful to have contributed.
Two days of rich, cross-disciplinary science reminded me that understanding food, flavor, and behavior requires more than treating people like machines. We need to embrace the quirks, the biases, and yes, even the cookie stomachs, that make us human.
Let me know if you’d like to chat about what I saw and learned.
