Category Ask the Psychologist

For the same reason bagels have holes – so they’re not a gooey mess inside. Although doughnuts and bagels are cooked in different ways (fried and baked, respectively), both are dense with dough when they’re solid disk. To help them cook evenly all the way through, bakers punch out the middles. The holes also helped bakers display doughnuts on sticks when they were introduced in the late 1800s.

Donuts became popular in America around the same time bagels were becoming popular. Bakers and street vendors would often sell bagels stacked on long sticks or strung on a long rope. Some people believe that the holes in donuts allowed them to be sold in a similar way. Many people believe that those pieces of cut-out dough are what are used to make donut holes, which are those little round donut pieces that so many kids love to eat with milk.

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(1) Don’t guzzle water! Although a splash of icy H2O might provide momentary relief, it will only scatter the scorching capsaicin chemical throughout your mouth, spreading the pain.

(2) Do drink milk, which actually works like a vacuum to slurp the capsaicin from your pain receptors. The colder the milk, the better.

(3) If you don’t have milk, you can eat another dairy product such as cottage cheese, yogurt, or – best of all – ice cream!

(4) Mix a tablespoon of sugar into a glass of water, then swish the water around in your mouth and spit it out. The sugar in the water bonds with the capsaicin, clearing it from your mouth.

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A chemist named Wilbur Scoville developed a scale to answer this very question in 1912. His system measures the heat factor of chili peppers in multiples of 100 “Scoville units,” as rated by human tasters with iron tongues! The higher the rating, the hotter the pepper. Here’s a peppering of peppers from all parts of the Scoville scale spectrum:

Green Bell Pepper: 0 Scoville units

Tabasco Pepper: 50,000 Scoville units

Jalapeno Pepper: 5,000 Scoville units

Habanaga Pepper: 500,000 Scoville units

Ghost Pepper: 1,000,000 Scoville units

The Ghost Pepper is so hot that it will burn your skin unless you wear gloves. The capsaicin concentration in ghost pepper is even higher than the amount used in pepper spray, a nonlethal weapon wielded by police.

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That bowl of four-alarm chili is waging chemical warfare on your tongue. Chili peppers contain capsaicin (pronounced cap-SAY-ah-sin), a substance that triggers the sensations of pain and heat when it touches your tongue (or, in the case of the hottest peppers, even your hands). Pepper plants likely evolved this compound to keep away nibbling animals. Spicy-food connoisseurs build up a resistance to capsaicin by gradually eating progressively hotter peppers until they can nibble thermonuclear meals while working up only a mild sweat.

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Because they’re not real meals. Each dish, dessert, and drink has been carefully prepared and arranged by a “food stylist,” a special food photographer who uses all sorts of sneaky tricks to make dishes look scrumptious for commercials, cookbooks, and menus. The stylist stuffs baked chicken with napkins to plump it up and paints burgers with burnt matches to stimulate grill marks. Milk is substituted with kindergarten glue so cereals don’t look soggy. Dish soap is dabbled on the surface of drinks to give that fresh-poured look. Um, yum?

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Your brain is split into two symmetrical (or mirror-image) halves known as hemispheres, connected by a ribbon of white matter known as the corpus callosum, through which both halves communicate. It’s common knowledge that the right side of the brain is the source of music concertos, masterpiece paintings, and deep emotions, while the left side specializes in solving logic problems and dealing with numbers. But in this case, common knowledge is incorrect. While the various lobes have their specialties (language, memory, sensory perception, etc.), experiments show that both hemispheres pull their weight during every task. While the left hemisphere excels at detecting words in sounds, for example, the right hemisphere detects the emotions in those words.

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