Hot Heads

The article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/science/21peppers.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=science       

    I hate spicy food. I just don’t get it. Eating chilies, in my world, is like playing paintball—it hurts and does me little good. Still, tons of people love spicy food. Even worse, many people go out of their way to make their spicy food even spicier. I will never understand.
    My loathing for the whole thing, however, is what drew me to this article. I believe it is extremely well-written. I learned about harvesting chilies, the Scoville heat scale, capsaicin and evolution. I enjoyed the personal stories of the author, James Gorman—his confession that he is a chili wimp, the caretaking of his own chili garden, and those kitchen escapades with his son and a respirator. And I laughed. The piece is quite humorous and charming, but also informative. And I have to thank the author for that.
    But moving on to the content. Basically, it says chilies are painfully hot and that’s exactly why we like them. There’s been a lot of research in the subject and the conclusion is that human beings are “benign masochists.” We enjoy the pain (well some of us do), and want to test our limits. One scientist compared it to riding a roller coaster, but I don’t think that’s a legitimate comparison—roller coasters are painless. Anyway, the kicker is that we seem to be the only animals in the world that take pleasure in pain, and there’s a good deal of humor to be made out of that: “since it takes such a complicated brain and weird self-awareness to enjoy something that is inherently not enjoyable, only the animal with the biggest brain and the most intricate mind can do it…It’s not dumb to eat the fire, it’s a sign of high intelligence.”