It’s been pretty well documented now that your tastes (sweet, salty, bitter, sour or umami) are divided up on the tongue – is a myth.
The reality is that each of the roughly 8,000 taste buds scattered over the tongue is capable of sensing all of the tastes – special cells within those taste buds determine which taste is happening. A new study from a Columbia University team published in the journal nature explored how the cell signal gets to the brain and where in an attempt to develop treatment for elderly people losing their sense of taste, thus eating less.
This is how they did it:
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A team engineered mice so that their taste neurons would fluoresce when they were activated. They then trained their endoscopes on the neurons deep at their base of the brain. The animals were fed chemicals to trigger either a salty, bitter, sour, sweet or umami response on the tongue and the researchers monitored the change in the brain. They found a “hard wired” connection between tongue and brain.
Finding a direct, specific connection could in fact be a helpful development in the hope of finding solutions for elderly people.
“These findings provide an interesting avenue to help deal with this problem because you have a clear understanding of how taste is functioning so you could imagine ways of enhancing that function,” Prof Charles Zuker told BBC News.
[Photo from Flickr user M Glasgow]
