Tongue And Taste

Gustation: Sense of Taste

Taste and smell are chemical senses. They give us information about the chemical composition of our surroundings. Taste is an immediate sense - a final checkpoint for the acceptability of food before it enters the body. Smell is a more distant sense allowing us to detect small concentrations of airborne substances.

Taste • Diet regulation • Last chance to detect a poison prior to  ingestion

Only five primary tastes can be distinguished: sour sweet bitter salty The umami taste recently described as “ meaty”.

Anatomy of  Taste Papillae • Circumvilliate • Folliate • Filliform • Fungiform

Circumvilliate

Folliate

Filliform

Fungiform

Anatomy of Taste • Taste Receptors  • Taste Buds occur on the soft palate and on  some Papillae ­ Foliate, Circumvallete,  Fungiform, Filliform (no taste buds) • About 10,000 taste buds

• The supporting cells surround about 50 gustatory receptor cells. • A single long microvillus called a gustatory hair project from each gustatory receptor cell to the external surface through the taste pore, an opening in the taste bud. • Basal cells, found at the periphery of the taste bud near the connective tissue layer, produce supporting cells, which then develop into gustatory receptor cells with a life span of about 10 days.

Central Gustatory Pathway     Taste buds ­>  Solitary Tract  (part of the  Medulla) ­>  Thalamus ­>  Frontal Lobe

Properties of Taste • The dimensions of taste Sour

Salty Bitter Sweet

Properties of Taste • • •

Taste preferences for familiar food Single trial learning ­ taste aversion Self­Balancing diet