03/01/2022
WHY PUTTING SALT IN YOUR MOUTH RELIEVES THE PAIN OF HAVING PEPPER IN YOUR EYES.
Last year, while preparing the food for Daddy’s birthday, Martha mistakenly put pepper in her eyes. An older woman suggested she put some salt on her tongue. A few minutes later, Martha was smiling — the pain was gone.
I have heard about this home remedy for decades. It is one that grandmothers swear by. However, I found the claim of its effectiveness baffling — it defied my very basic knowledge of science. I was disturbed about this, so I sought to find answers.
My first step in my quest for an explanation was to ask “Does putting salt on the tongue help to relieve the pain of having pepper in the eyes?” To answer this, I sampled opinions from friends and family on Whatsapp, Facebook and off the internet.
About 79% of the respondents said the remedy gave them some form of relief. So yes, for most people — at least according to the data from my small sample — putting salt in their mouth provided some relief.
After some thought and research, I adapted two constructs as possible explanations for this phenomenon:
1. The Placebo Effect
2. Sensory Overload
The Placebo Effect
If you have 300 people complaining of a headache and you give them chalk shaped like paracetamol, a few of them might come back hours later to say they are feeling somewhat better. The belief that what you gave them was a drug triggers physiological processes that alter their perception of the pain. The chalk is a placebo, the relief reported is the proudly sponsored by the placebo effect. The placebo effect is based on the idea that your brain can convince your body that a fake treatment is the real thing. This phenomenon has been widely documented in medical and psychology circles. It is such a big deal that during most trials, a drug is only considered to be effective if it performs better than a placebo.
As an explanation for our salt remedy, it is possible that the salt is a placebo, and whatever relief gained from it is by virtue of the — allow me to loosely use the word — “faith” that it is going to be effective.
Sensory Overload
When we spoke about why the salt remedy seemed to be so effective, some of my friends suggested that it was because the taste of the salt ‘tricks’ or ‘distracts’ the brain from the pain. Some research shows that this is plausible.
The theory here is simply that sensory input from one sense organ could affect how the brain perceives stimulus from another organ. So the salt provides stimulus that effectively reduces the sensitivity of the eyes to the pain of the pepper, essential causing what I would like to call “sensory overload” (not to be confused with sensory overload anxiety). You are loading the brain with sensory input from the tongue so it doesn't have to focus too much on the stimulus coming from the tissue in your eyes.
Fortunately, this claim is backed by literature. Way back in 1920, C.S. Sherrington posited that “…all parts of the nervous system are connected together and no part of it is probably ever capable of reaction without affecting and being affected by various other parts…” More interestingly, studies have shown how sight, for instance, can be affected by sound. Going by this and Sherrington’s claim, it is logical to think that such relationships exist all through the nervous system. This offers a possible explanation as to why the salt remedy works. It could also explain why your mum asks you to turn down the volume so she could smell if her rice is boiling.
Which explanation is your favourite?
Personally, both explanations sound interesting and equally possible. I can not say which of them is true, or if any of them is true. It is possible that both sensory overload and the placebo effect are acting together to make the salt remedy work. Whatever the case, it was interesting playing with the thought in my head and researching to find an explanation.
Do you have another theory or disagree with any of these ones? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
https://link.medium.com/aWm7X35Jwmb
Grandmothers swear by this remedy. But does it really work? How? Here are two theories.
