So I suppose it's time to start getting back into the swing of things...how quickly a week can fly by! OK, so in a continuation of the special senses, I have to repeat that I find the fact that senses are based on perceptions very unscientific. It's sorta funny how everything else we learn about has some sort of accepted theory or is agreed upon for the most part, yet senses are not.
I remember when I was in middle school we were taught about the taste map, where in the back of the tongue were the sour/bitter receptors, the sweet were in the front and the salty were on the edges. I just now found out that that is a bunch of malarkey. All of these taste sensations arise from all regions of the oral cavity. The "mouth map" is a myth, generally attributed to the poor translation of a German text, and has been taught in North American schools since the early twentieth century. Actually, very slight regional differences in sensitivity to compounds exist, though these regional differences are subtle and do not conform exactly to the mythical tongue map. Individual taste buds (which contain approximately 100 taste receptor cells), in fact, typically respond to compounds evoking each of the four basic tastes.
Taste and smell are combined to mean flavor. Other factors include the food's smell, its texture, detected by mechanoreceptors, and its temperature, detected by thermoreceptors are all inputs to our brains to sort and merge to form the flavor we taste.
In Western culture, the concept of basic tastes can be traced back at least to Aristotle, who cited sweet, bitter, succulent, salt, pungent, harsh, astringent, and acid as tastes. The ancient Chinese Five Elements philosophy lists slightly different five basic tastes: bitter, salty, sour, sweet, and spicy. Japanese and Indian cultures each have their own sixth taste in addition to the basic five.
The receptors for all known basic tastes have been identified. The receptors for sour and salty are ion channels (H+ and Na+ respectively), while the receptors for sweet, bitter, and umami belong to the class of G protein second messenger systems (sounds familiar doesn't it).
Well, that's what I learned today...see you all Tuesday!
1 comment:
that was a cool thing to write about. i always thought it was a load of baloney, that tongue map haha. i used to try to test it by placing certain foods on certain parts of my tongue and seeing if i tasted it if it were say, salty, and i placed it on sweet. i think i always tasted it no matter where tho. i'm not sure. i'm going to test that tonight :)
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