Gabriele Munter's Breakfast of the Birds
Q: How did you get started in your research?
A: I study what I study today because I am a poor eater. I grew up in an Italian family and one thing no one will ever convince me to do is to stop eating carbs. There was no such thing as a portion size in my family, but for much of my life, my metabolism saved me. That, of course, didn't last forever.
Q: Can you talk about creativity in science, with a particular focus on how it influences your research?
A: I began my research with lab rats. We’ve actually learned a lot about eating from rats because they’ve essentially co-evolved with humans. They’ll eat pretty much anything we eat. If I give them pizza, they'll eat pizza. I noticed that my rats loved saccharin flavor and anything high in calories. The stronger the sweetness, the more they liked it. Now, that wasn’t too interesting but then I discovered that whatever the flavor – if you made it a banana-flavored drink that tasted sweet and had lots of calories – when I gave them a plain banana-flavored drink later on, they would drink tons of it.
The creativity really came when I began to question whether what we were observing in the rats could occur with humans. So often we just assume: It happened in the rat, so it will happen in a human. Researchers should know that’s not a safe assumption.
A lot of creativity went into the research design as well. How do you make a study realistic? How do you get the subjects to care about the study? Which foods do I use? It was a challenge for me because for the first time I had to ask myself, What do other people like to eat?
Q: Your first book, The Psychological Dieter, came out this month. Writing a book, even a nonfiction one, is an incredibly creative process. What was it like for you?
A: It was a pretty big challenge. As a researcher, you don’t have to write in a way that’s interesting. In many ways, you’re taught to write in a very boring way: "This is exactly what I did. These are the results. This is the interpretation. This is the future direction. Good-bye." I gave my twin brother a copy of the book and asked him, “Do you think the general public would be interested in this?” After reading the first two chapters, he called me back and said, “Greg, I don’t think the general public would be interested in reading this book. I’ve read two chapters of it and I keep learning stuff. I don’t want you to teach me anything. I just want you to tell me what to do.” I thought, "Interesting. Okay. I guess it’s not for the general public." But I still wanted to make it interesting for health practitioners, for perhaps a smaller, more targeted section of the public, and definitely for other academics. Many academics are still focused on the biological processes of hunger and fullness but our research and other research suggests our learning has a much stronger effect on why we actually eat when and what we eat than the biological processes do.
Q: Some would argue that psychology itself is an art and not a science. How would you respond to this criticism of the field?
A: I would agree that psychology is in many ways an art. You can’t separate the science component of psychology, but at the same time, the only law of behavior is that there is no law and will never be a law of behavior. What makes an individual fall in love? I could create a manipulation where I make an individual very beautiful and that would cause a certain group of people to fall in love and another certain group of people are not going to fall in love for that reason. Then I can wait five years and ask the same group of people and now the fact that that individual’s beautiful will no longer cause them to fall in love. The scientific value of psychology is that observations are made systematically, in controlled settings. The artistic value of psychology is that the world is not controlled and not necessarily systematic. Because it has both aspects, psychology allows us to describe behavior, an incredibly difficult thing to even define, a little better.
Q: Are there any artworks that have influenced your research?
A: No, there aren't, to be quite honest. But I like to display artwork that expresses the type of research I do. For example, I have a print of the 1934 painting called Breakfast of the Birds by Gabriele Munter hanging on the wall in my office. I find meaning in paintings that have to do with food or describe an occasion of eating.
Q: Any final thoughts to add?
A: Depending on how you define art, it affects the occasion of eating. There’s a good deal of research that suggests calming or enjoyable music causes individuals to eat more in restaurants. If we are eating while watching an enjoyable television show or movie, we eat more than we otherwise would. So not only can food itself be used as an expression of artistic value, but we eat at different rates depending on how much we enjoy the "art" that surrounds us.Labels: Scientist Q-and-A
