• Question: why when we want to eat food we can taste it in our mouthes and all diffrent sences

    Asked by bubblegum to Dalya, Derek, Sarah, Tim, Tom on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Derek McKay-Bukowski

      Derek McKay-Bukowski answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      We have taste buds on our tongue. They let us taste the food. They can tell the difference between salty, sweet, sour and bitter.

      However, we also use our sense of smell to get an idea of what the food is. To our mouths, there is not a lot of difference between a peeled slice of raw potato and a peeled slice of apple. It is the fact that we can smell the apple, that let’s our brain know what we are eating.

    • Photo: Sarah Thomas

      Sarah Thomas answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      I think that sound also plays a role in helping our brain detect food. There’s something about that sizzling barbeque sound that makes me really hungry!

      Food also contains chemical stimuli that trigger chemoreceptors that tell your brain what you’re eating. Smell and taste are reactions to those chemical stimuli and are closely related as Derek mentioned. Your taste buds are like little taste pores and when food molecules mix with your saliva, they hit the pores and create a taste stimulus. The stimulus triggers an electrical impulse which travels along your neurons and the taste part of your cerebral cortex kicks in to figure out that the electrical impulse is taste.

    • Photo: Tim Millar

      Tim Millar answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Memory and the body getting ready to digest the food, why we produce saliva

    • Photo: Tom Crick

      Tom Crick answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Take a look at this diagram of how the different tastes are detected on the tongue.

      Smell is also a strong component of taste — I can confirm this (I am quite a fussy eater), as I will refuse to eat or even taste anything that doesn’t smell niceMATOMO_URL

      * This is not very scientific, sample size of one!

Comments