Taste
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Taste is one of the most common and fundamental of the senses of animals. It is the direct detection of chemical composition, usually through contact with chemoreceptor cells. Taste is very similar to olfaction , the sense of smell, in which the chemical composition of an organism's ambient medium is detected by chemoreceptors. It helps determine flavor.
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Role of the nervous system
Template:Main In humans, the sense of taste is transduced by taste buds and is conveyed via three of the twelve cranial nerves. The facial nerve carries taste sensations from the anterior two thirds of the tongue (excluding the circumvallate papillae, see lingual papilla) and soft palate, the glossopharyngeal nerve carries taste sensations from the posterior one third of the tongue (including the circumvallate papillae) while a branch of the vagus nerve carries some taste sensations from the back of the oral cavity (i.e. pharynx and epiglottis). Information from these cranial nerves is processed by the gustatory system.
It is important to note that the axons from these cranial nerves ascend in the spinal cord without crossing over. These fibers terminate in the amygdala, hypothalamus, and ventral posterior medial nucleus of the thalamus, which then projects to the somatosensory cortex within the brain. Thus, a lesion of the rostral nucleus solitarius, tractus solitarius, or solitariothalamic tract results in loss of taste from the ipsilesional, the same side as the lesion, half of the tongue.
Basic classification of tastes
As a general rule, taste is a holistic assessment of the interaction of the fundamental taste systems of sweetness, sour, bitter, salty, and umami, or "savouriness". Location of the stimulus on the tongue is not important, despite the common misperception of a "taste map" of sensitivity to different tastes thought to correspond to specific areas of the tongue [1]. The "mouth map" is a myth. It is a misinterpretation of a German medical paper by a Harvard psychology student in 1901 Template:Fact. In reality, the separate populations of taste buds sensing each of the basic tastes are distributed across the tongue.
If half of the tongue is blocked from sending information to the brain, people will report that a doubling of psychological perception has occurred for sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.
Factors affecting taste perception
There exists a lot of factors affecting taste perception:
- Aging
- Hormonal influences
- Genetic variations
- Oral temperature
- Drugs and chemicals
It is also worthwhile to know that flavour is the overall, total sensation from a foodstuff during mastication (e.g. taste, touch, pain and smell), and smell (olfactory stimulation) plays a main role for flavour perception.
Disorders of taste
- ageusia (complete loss)
- hypogeusia (partial loss)
- parageusia (unpleasant taste)
- dysgeusia (inaccurate taste)
Taste in aesthetics
- Main article taste (aesthetics).
Taste can also refer to appreciation for aesthetic quality, significantly applying the purely physical term to an intellectual quality. In such contexts Taste begins to be used in a metaphorical sense to refer to certain degrees of cultural competence, closely related to the concept of discrimination; it can set distinctions between "tasteful" and "tasteless" or the embodiments of "good taste" or "bad taste", thus providing categories for social division and reinforcing cultural hierarchy.
The modern concept of "taste" is a product of the 16th century Italian Mannerism: the idea of "taste" as a quality that is independent of the style that is simply its vehicle — though the style might be designated a taste, such as "the Antique taste"— was born in the circle of Pope Julius III and first realized at the Villa Giulia he built on the edge of Rome in 1551–1555.
To the Enlightenment, "taste" was still a universal character, which could be recognized by what pleased any cultured sensibility. With the shift in perspective that Romanticism brought, it began to be thought that, to the contrary, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and could be individually interpreted, with results that might be of equivalent aesthetic value.
Taste as a metaphor for experience or knowledge
To taste is also used metaphorically to describe having a small amount of experience with something that gives a sense of its quality as a whole. Livy is quoted to have said "they had not yet tasted the sweetness of freedom" while Voltaire is quoted to have said "I tasted in her arms the delights of paradise". The word is often used as a noun in this sense, typically in such expressions as "I got a taste of it" or "It left a bad taste in my mouth."
See also
- Aesthetics
- Art
- Fine art
- Visual arts and design
- Connoisseur
- Critic
- Recommendation system (computer science)
- Supertasterde:Geschmackssinn
es:Gusto fr:Goût he:טעם ja:味覚 pl:Smak (fizjologia) pt:Paladar sv:Smak