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This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher Entagata. Got a minute?

Back in ancient times, philosophers like Aristotle were already speculating about the origins of taste

and how the tongue sensed elemental tastes like sweet and bitter, salty and sour.

What we discovered just a few years ago is that there are regions of the brain, regions of the cortex,

where particular fields of neurons represent these different tastes again.

So there's a sweet field, a bitter field, a salty field, etc.

Nick Reba is sensory neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health.

Reba and his colleagues found that you can actually taste without a tongue at all,

simply by stimulating the taste part of the brain, the insular cortex.

They ran the experiment in mice with a special sort of brain implant,

a fiber optic cable that

turns neurons on with a pulse of laser light. And by switching on the bitter sensing part of the

brain, they were able to make mice pucker up as if they were tasting something bitter,

even though absolutely nothing bitter was touching the tongues of the mice. In another experiment,

the researchers fed the mice a bitter flavoring on their tongues,

but then made it more palatable by switching on the sweet zone in the brain.

What we were doing here was adding the sweetness, but only adding it in the brain,

...