Why do we find something spicy extra spicy after eating something sweet, and vice versa?

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Why do we find something spicy extra spicy after eating something sweet, and vice versa?

In: Biology

Anonymous 0 Comments

The “extra spicy” is just the larger gap between the two states of spicy and sweet. If your mouth, without any spicy or sweet in it, is 0; then changing to spicy or sweet would be going from 0 to 1 or 0 to -1, an absolute difference of 1 in both cases. Going from sweet (-1) to spicy (1) is an absolute difference of 2, so the change is more drastic and thus more noticeable. Same goes for going from 1 to -1. Your body (or more specifically, your brain) just applies this larger difference to the spicy/sweet feeling to simplify things.