The tongue has taste buds on the fungiform papillae, palate, and throat, but not divided into sections. The five tastes are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. The sense of taste is a complex interaction of smell and taste, with the gustatory cortex processing gustatory inputs. Some people are “supertasters.”
The sense of taste begins with the taste buds, located on top of the fungiform papillae, or large bumps on the tongue. Other taste receptor cells can be found on the palate and throat, but the tongue has the most. Fungiform papillae have a mushroom-like shape and sometimes swell a little when stimulated. Alongside the fungiform papillae are the filiform papillae, small brush-like protuberances that usually lack receptor cells.
Contrary to what you may have heard, the tongue is not divided into taste sections. This is a myth based on a mistranslation of a German book that has been perpetuated in schools since the early 1900s. If you put a little salt or sugar on different sections of the language, you’ll see that you can taste it everywhere.
The five recognized tastes are sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. Umami could easily be called salty, but it gets its name from the Japanese word for the same thing because a Japanese researcher first discovered it in 1908. This discovery happened in conjunction with the chemical isolation and subsequent commercialization of MSG as a flavor enhancer.
Equally important to the sensation of this sense are the olfactory cells in the nose which detect scent. What we perceive as taste is a complex interaction of smell and taste of the tongue. The nose, tongue, eyes, and brain all evolved together to ensure that we consume the good stuff and keep the bad out: spoiled foods, poisonous foods, and other indigestibles.
An important and often unmentioned component of this sense is the gustatory cortex, a section of the brain’s surface near the back, which processes gustatory inputs. It is located near the parts of the brain that control chewing and swallowing. About 25% of the population are “supertastors,” experiencing heightened senses, partly due to a higher density of taste buds and partly due to subtle brain differences in how this sense is processed.
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