Pushing our Senses Further -- Miracle Berries

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The taste presentation was a strange and wonderful experience for me. As someone who has never tried miracle berries before, it was pretty mind blowing. I did some research after class about the miracle berries because I didn’t understand how they fully worked. Below I’ve pasted an excerpt from “HowStuffWorks”.

“In 1968, scientists isolated the active protein responsible for making things taste sweet. Because of its miraculous way of making things taste so good, the protein was dubbed miraculin. When miracle fruit is consumed, the miraculin in the berry binds to the taste buds on the tongue. A person has receptors on their taste buds that identify sweet, sour, bitter and savory tastes. Normally, if you were to eat a lemon, your sour receptors would start firing…Under the influence of miraculin, however, the sweet receptors start signaling and suppress the sour tastes. The miraculin rewires the sweet receptors to temporarily identify acids as sugars.”

Originally when I first had the miracle berries, I thought it was altering something chemically in my brain, but in fact it is protein binding to the buds of my tongue. It is truly mind-blowing to me how something that is grown in the wild can do such a strange and wonderful thing to alter our senses.
However, if senses can be altered, what is the extent we can go? Can we heighten our sense of smell temporarily? Make our hearing to be able to listen lower or higher pitches? Develop a drug to make our sense of touch amazing? Many of these drugs already exist today, but more synthetically drugs could potentially push our senses past what we currently understand. When do we cross the line of reaching something paranormal?

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