Yum! A slice of chocolate cake from the new cafe’ taste just like your grandmother’s!  But wait! How did you just remember that? Can taste be a memory? Also, how does our body remember taste? 

Today we find out more about how our tongues taste food, how we remember the taste, and how remembering how food tastes have led to the creation of a computing neural system, without which a lot of the technology we see around us today, won't be present.

Taste: A conversation

Seems like a dumb question, but what is taste? Is it just the flavor of the food? The number of specific chemicals in it? Well sort of. 

Taste or “Gustation”, the act of tasting, is what is being detected by the taste cells that are present all around our mouth. These cells, better known as “taste buds” combine with the molecules in food and send them as signals to the brain. And what the brain perceives these stimuli as is called taste, which is roughly categorized as sweet, sour, salty, and umami(savory or meaty taste).

It’s almost like the taste buds and the brain is having a conversation about the food.

 Fun Fact: You can’t taste spice! 

Yes, you read that right! You don’t taste the spice, but rather feel it. It’s just a pain signal sent by the nerves that sense touch and temperature sensations. And the chemical compound responsible for this painful sensation is capsaicin, which is present in chilis and other hot peppers.

And since eating spicy food causes pain, the body treats it the same way, by causing an increase in blood pressure, profuse sweating, the release of stress hormones, a significant increase in breathing rate, etc., almost making spice a weapon that can be used in combat!

The Neural Network of Taste

To better understand how we remember taste let’s take an example. Say you are eating a slice of cake. Before putting it into your mouth you first get a sniff of it, without even trying to do so. Then you put the cake in your mouth, and the cake reaches the taste buds. After which both the tiny nerves in the nose and mouth send signals through the central nervous system of your body( through the medulla and thalamus) until finally reaching the gustatory cortex, where there are millions of neurons ready to process those signals and assign them an identity. After the gustatory system, the signals finally reach the limbic system( the oldest system in the brain) where the system compares these signals to those signals which had been previously established, and thus you realize you have eaten a slice of cake. And this all occurs within milliseconds. 

This is the base of a Neural system, which is present in computers today that process information and compare it to its memory sources and produce a result. And yes, this system has been inspired by our very own complex biological neural system. Pretty cool, isn't it?

Conclusion

Thus, our body basically had an archive of almost every “taste signal” that had passed through it and this helps us to know what we are eating. Our body does this, and so much more even while eating like hearing, carrying out conversations, taking our utensils and using them to eat our food,  etc., all perfectly coordinated and synchronized. Even modern-day computers using thousands of units of energy couldn't do this, but our body and its computer (our brain) do it flawlessly with our brain only using a mere 12 Watts of power. Thus, our brain is the world’s most efficient and complex computer in the world, and the human body, is the most brilliant system in the universe.

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My Blog and me

Hey! It’s Steven! I am a high school student who has orbited the sun about 16 times. And this is my blog, where I talk about the internet, science, technology, and the world around us along with a few of my adventures exploring it. I hope you like reading my content, as much as I love creating it!