Bits and pieces about our senses of taste
- Taste and smell are chemical senses. They give us information about the chemical composition of our surroundings. Taste is an immediate sense – a final checkpoint for the acceptability of food before it enters the body. Smell is a more distant sense allowing us to detect small concentrations of airborne substances.
- Taste and smell only separated when animals moved to land. Since in the sea, all chemicals are dissolved in the same medium (water) there is no need for two separate senses. Fish and other sea creatures have one general chemical sense.
- Taste is not just in the mouth. Catfish have chemoreceptors all along their body (a catfish is like a giant tongue), and flies have receptors on their feet so that they can tell immediately upon landing whether an object is good to eat.
- Taste is a complex mixture of flavours and aroma, or smell.
- The receptors for the human sense of taste are located on the tongue and on the soft palate. There are just five stimuli to which these receptors respond.
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The traditional view is that tastes are detected on different parts of the tongue (see the taste map opposite). Receptors for each taste are located in taste buds in specific areas of the tongue and each area can only detect one particular taste.
However, more recent research suggests that this may not be the case. The taste buds are still found in the same areas on the tongue but each one can detect all five tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, salt and umami). The brain is able to recognise which receptors are being stimulated and this goes towards the flavour sensation that we experience. The way in which we taste foods and perceive flavours is clearly very complex.The traditional view is that tastes are detected on different parts of the tongue (see the taste map opposite). Receptors for each taste are located in taste buds in specific areas of the tongue and each area can only detect one particular taste.
Our sense of smell also makes up a big part of how well we ‘taste’ food. Flavour molecules in the food enter the air in the nose and are detected by millions of receptors that feed information to the brain. Chewing helps to transfer more odour from the mouth to the back of the nose. The area which is sensitive to smell is located at the back of the nose where several million receptor cells per square centimetre respond to thousands of chemicals in the food.
Sight plays an unexpectedly important role in our perception of flavours. The taste of a colourless, shapeless food is extremely difficult to recognise. We may need visual “clues” to enable us to identify taste and flavour accurately.
The brain interprets signals from taste, smell and even vision before turning them into an impression of the food’s taste. Different people will find different tastes nice or unpleasant. Flavourings are added to food products to give, enhance or intensify flavour.
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Learning materials
- Read articles on Taste and Tongue: CLICK HERE OR DOWNLOAD (마우스 오른쪽을 눌러서 Save as)
- If your are a visual learner CLICK HERE