Many of us learned, at a young age, about the sections of the tongue that tasted the different tastes. (Who else will admit to sticking the tip of your tongue into sugar to see if that was really where sweetness was tasted?) But the research that told us all about these regions was wrong.
Back in the 1900s a scientist named Hanig researched the relative sensitivity of sections of the tongue to different tastes. Note that the key word here is ‘relative’. Hanig didn’t set out to find, neither did he prove that only certain parts of the tongue tastes certain things. It was later in that century when another scientist, named Boring, got a hold of Hanig’s data and did a bunch of calculations resulting in a graph that looked like all the places that Hanig found were relatively more sensitive to certain tastes were the only areas of the tongue that tasted those particular tastes. Thus the map of the tongue was born.
The truth was found, about 30 years later, that actually all the tastes were registered all across the tongue as well as on the back of the roof of the mouth and on the epiglottis (That thing that keeps food and water from going down your windpipe.).
So, if you are determined to prove at least one teacher wrong in your lifetime, go pick up the phone. Or better yet, ignore the phone, pick up some chocolate and revel in the fact that you can taste it from just about anywhere in your mouth . . . Mmm!
[By the way, if you want to read more about this and the extra taste that most of wester society ignored for a couple decades, this is where I got my information: http://www.livescience.com/7113-tongue-map-tasteless-myth-debunked.html ]
~Post by Amber Kolaga~
No comments:
Post a Comment