Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my.

Oh, wow. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, Episode 58, Taste.

And I'm your host, James Fodor.

So in this episode, we're going to look at the sense of taste.

In particular, we'll discuss the basic anatomy behind taste, how the different senses in the tongue detect different chemicals,

how those signals are then transmitted to the brain, and the different regions of the brain that are responsible for processing those signals.

And I'll also have a look at a few other interesting aspects of taste, like pungency, for example, and aftertaste and a few other interesting little bits and pieces.

So, let's get started. So the sense of taste, more formally known as gustation, is a sensation produced when a

substance in the mouth reacts chemically with receptors of the taste buds. In order for this to happen,

it's generally necessary for the food to be dissolved in a solution. So that's one of the reasons

why we have saliva, because food goes in your mouth and you chew it up and it gets dissolved in the saliva.

And then that saliva sort of sloshes around over the tongue and interacts with the chemical receptors in the taste buds.

So it's quite difficult to taste things if you don't have any saliva off here, but very dry mouth.

So taste is a form of chemoreception, which means that it's the detection of sensors via chemical interactions between molecules.

That's similar to, for example, olfaction smell, which is also a chemoreception,

and distinct from mechanoreceptors, which are like how we detect pressure and touch, and also sound.

Sound is detected by mechanoreceptors, so those detect motion, and photoreceptors, which operate

by detection of photons, so light, and that's, for example, in the eye, we have photoreceptors.

But taste, or gestation, is a form of chemoreception.

It's important to distinguish between the related, though distinct concepts of taste and flavor. So in sort of everyday language, we use

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