REAL LIFE NEWS: HOW THE BRAIN TASTES
By Hazed
Before you think I am advocating that you should start to eat brains, zombie-style, actually I am referring to how the brain processes the sense of taste…
It turns out that the brain has neurons which specialise in each of the five taste categories, which are sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami.
You probably remember those from school where you were shown a diagram of a tongue and told that taste buds on different areas were for the different tastes. Actually scientists have known for years that it’s bunkum, and that the roughly 8,000 taste buds all over the tongue can taste the full set of tastes. It’s specialist cells within the taste buds that are tuned to the different tastes.
Now they have shown what happens when the taste buds send signals to the brain, using mice which have been specially engineered so their taste neurons fluoresce when they are activated. The mice were fed different tasting chemicals, designed to trigger the various taste categories, and the changes in their brains was monitored.
The results showed that there was a direct link between the tongue and the brain, with the taste bud cells relating to different parts of the brain. As Professor Charles Zuker from Columbia University explained, “The cells were beautifully tuned to discrete individual taste qualities, so you have a very nice match between the nature of the cells in your tongue and the quality they represent [in the brain].”
This research has practical uses. As you age, your taste buds get less responsive which means elderly people often don’t enjoy eating any more. The hope is that scientists could find a way to make the cells in the taste buds more responsive, so they send a stronger signal to the brain, thus restoring lost taste sensations.
