When I was in elementary school—must have been a year when I was attending a good one—we did an experiment where we tasted things with different parts of our tongue. It was experimentally verified by us that the way things tasted depended on the region. And then we ate an apple while smelling an onion, and compared the sensations of immersing our hands in hot water or ice water separately and simultaneously.
Was this experiment done before you learned the tongue map? Have you tried it again?
Suggestibility affects taste significantly; see the wine tasting experiment, and the well-known visual component of eating. Very fine chefs sometimes cannot identify ingredients just by tasting them (see: Top Chef Masters.)
Further, this sounds like yet another data point in the need for double blind studies.
Still, it’s nice to see kids involved in experiments of some sort.
I did a mini-experiment before posting the comment. I only had chips on hand, so this was meant to be an experiment with detecting saltiness, while holding my nose. The experiment was difficult to interpret due to uneven salt on the chips, but I decided that while the salt was detected by all parts of my tongue, the taste sensation felt different—from tangy to itchy, depending on the region. I decided that tasting was “complicated”—that was my only conclusion.
When I was in elementary school—must have been a year when I was attending a good one—we did an experiment where we tasted things with different parts of our tongue. It was experimentally verified by us that the way things tasted depended on the region. And then we ate an apple while smelling an onion, and compared the sensations of immersing our hands in hot water or ice water separately and simultaneously.
Interesting.
Was this experiment done before you learned the tongue map? Have you tried it again?
Suggestibility affects taste significantly; see the wine tasting experiment, and the well-known visual component of eating. Very fine chefs sometimes cannot identify ingredients just by tasting them (see: Top Chef Masters.)
Further, this sounds like yet another data point in the need for double blind studies.
Still, it’s nice to see kids involved in experiments of some sort.
I did a mini-experiment before posting the comment. I only had chips on hand, so this was meant to be an experiment with detecting saltiness, while holding my nose. The experiment was difficult to interpret due to uneven salt on the chips, but I decided that while the salt was detected by all parts of my tongue, the taste sensation felt different—from tangy to itchy, depending on the region. I decided that tasting was “complicated”—that was my only conclusion.