SMELL AND TASTE
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SMELL AND TASTE
Description of the tongue's functions of taste. Anatomical description of smell and explanation of what its job is.
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INTRODUCTION
The senses of taste and smell have the mission of capturing the chemical information of things which the brain interprets as small and flavour.
A important part of the action of savouring food is that of our being able to smell it.
The most active and versatile element we posses in the detection of chemical stimuli of taste is our tongue.
THE TONGUE
Our tongue is one of our organs having the most intense and varied activities of our whole body: nutrition, elaboration of oral language...
Parts of the tongue.
Papillae. Different types and their jobs. Salty, sweet, sour, acid and bitter tastes.
Saliva.
How we perceive a taste.
TASTE
As far as our ancestors were concerned, their being able to tell whether food was good or bad by its taste was a matter of life or death.
A human being is continuously losing taste buds.
The sensation of taste does not depend exclusively on flavour.
The texture of food, its resistence in our mouths and its smell are also important factors.
We can detect 4 basic tastes: salty, bitter, sour and sweet.
All the flavours we can detect are infinite combinations of these four basic sensations.
The tongue’s surface is not equally sensitive to these four basic tastes.
Taste is not a physical property of any substance.
Different cultures can influence our taste.
Sweetness is an agreeable flavour which induces man to eat, since sweet substances are usually great providers of energy.
A bitter taste is not normally considered attractive by man or many other animals because some toxic plants have bitter tastes (i.e: Belladona, poison ivy)
SMELL
The sense of smell is one of the most important and decisive in the animal kingdom.
Its development in man was halted when he started to evolve his sense of sight and intelligence.
Where smell is detected. Working of the sense of smell.
The cilia of the olfatory membrane.
People who have a “refined” sense of smell can distinguish between 100,000 different smells.
Our sense of smell is capable of distinguishing many more chemical substances that our sense of taste and is still of vital importance in our social and sexual behaviour.
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