They’ve performed a myriad of experiments proving that the mouth contains many taste buds, from the soft palate, to the tongue, and to the throat. Tantalizing Taste BudsĬountless researchers have since refuted the diagrams made famous by Hänig and Boring. As a result, it further contributed to the belief that different regions of the tongue only taste specific flavors. Like Hänig’s version, Boring’s had no meaningful scale. He reimagined the graph for his book Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology(1942). Boring, a Harvard psychology professor in the 1940s. As a result, he inadvertently implied that different regions of the tongue were responsible for different taste receptors.įurther exacerbating the problem was the appropriation of Hänig’s diagram by Edwin G. Although the diagram he created has a certain artistic flair, it misrepresents his research findings. Since umami was not officially recognized until 1908 and not widely researched until the 1980s, however, we need to give him a break here. First, he never tested for the fifth basic taste, umami, which detects savory flavors. While some of Hänig’s research holds up, there are a couple of fundamental flaws. Then, he created an artistic representation of where humans tasted what.ĭespite its ubiquity, the tongue map is a farce! Hänig also measured how long it took subjects to register specific tastes. That’s because these areas contain high concentrations of taste buds, tiny sensory organs. He referred to this area as the “taste belt.” To prove his hypothesis, Hänig dripped stimuli associated with specific tastes in intervals around the edges of his subjects’ tongues.īased on his findings, Hänig concluded that the edges and tips of the tongue are more sensitive to tastes than the rest of the organ. The diagram resulted from Hänig’s attempts to measure the thresholds for taste perception around the edges of the tongue. It first appeared in his 1901 paper, Zur Psychophysik des Geschmackssinnes. The tongue map that we all had to memorize in school is the brainchild of the German scientist, David P. Here’s the truth when it comes to how the human tongue tastes food, and it’s a lot more complicated than that handy-dandy little diagram. What’s more, it completely lacks the fifth basic taste, umami. But here’s the thing, it’s completely wrong! It represents a myth debunked by chemosensory scientists (the people who study how organs respond to chemical stimuli) a LONG time ago. This diagram is among the most widely recognized depictions of how the tongue works. Remember? Salty and sour on the sides, bitter at the back, and sweet at the tip. Each of these regions relates to a specific type of flavor.
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The drawing depicts different regions of the tongue distinguished by lines, color, or both. What do you think of when you hear the term “tongue map”? More than likely, you picture that little diagram of the human tongue that you learned about during a biology or human anatomy class in school.