(HealthDayNews) -- Heard the expression "I'm so close to winning I can taste it"?
Perhaps you can. But the taste of victory isn't sweet, it's salty. And the taste of defeat is even saltier.
Researchers from the University of Dresden in Germany studied the ions in the saliva of people trying a difficult problem-solving game. As the International Journal of Psychophysiology reports, those people who solved the problems easily had a rapid rise in their potassium levels, followed by a quick fall once the challenge was gone.
Those who struggled over the game had a drop in their sodium level, and those who failed completely had large elevations in both sodium and potassium.
