eat Archives | Intellexi Med

Taste Buds – Episode 108

November 27, 2017 in Podcasts tagged bitter / eat / flavors / food / salty / savory / science / smell / sour / sweet / taste buds / tongue / umami by Cynthia Hendrix

An image for your taste buds. A plate of bread and cheese with sliced salmon, a cup of yogurt with berries, a container of fancy crackers, a mug of black coffee, and a plate with red and black grapes, circular orange slices, and a half of grapefruit. It's all laid out on brown parchment paper on a table of raw wood planks.

Review

Smell plays a big part in your ability to taste. The bumps on your tongue that you can see are actually papillae.

4 Types of Papillae

Filiform

Filiform papillae are the most numerous papillae and are arranged in regular rows running parallel to the median sulcus. They are cone-shaped – either a single cone (like a volcano shape) or a frill of cones. These papillae don’t actually taste flavors but they do sense touch. They work as cleaners, helping your tongue create friction with other parts of your mouth to loosen bits of food from the nooks and crannies.

Foliate

These papillae are located on the sides of the tongue near the back. They are flat, leaf-like folds, and can be visible in some people. These papillae contain taste buds for flavors.

Fungiform

These are mushroom-shaped. They are scattered all over the tongue but seem to be more concentrated on the edges and tip of the tongue. They contain taste buds for flavor as well as the sense of touch.

Vallate (Circumvallate)

These papillae are dome-shaped with a border. The best description is that they appear as a circular fort with a mote around it and then a wall on the outside. Or maybe they look like a bunch of “outie” belly buttons! They are laid out on the back of the in a V-shaped pattern, pointing towards the back of the throat. These papillae can be visible in some people, and they contain taste buds for flavors as well.

Each papilla contains many taste buds. They are called “buds” because, microscopically, they appear as unopened rosebuds. Taste buds have a swirl-like funnel with an opening in the middle that contains fluid.

How You Taste

You put food in your mouth. Your saliva dissolves bits of it to free up molecules. The molecules that are mixed in your saliva wash into the funnels of each taste bud. There, the molecules mix into the taste bud fluid and get swirled around to come in contact with as many taste sensors (nerves) as possible. From here, the chemical signal changes into an electrical signal as the taste messages zoom into your brain. In the brain, the signal is translated and identified – including details such as flavor, pain, temperature, texture, intensity, and smell (while your saliva mixes with some molecules, other molecules are released into the air as aromatics and contact the olfactory sensors in your nose).

Taste Buds Map Truth

The taste bud map that has been used for years in textbooks was created in 1901. Even with all the things that we’ve learned about how taste buds work, where they’re located, and what they look like, this map has never been re-written. The original map identified four basic flavor categories: sweet, sour, salt, bitter. Yet, just nine years later, the Japanese were able to identify “umami” – that savory flavor that doesn’t quite fit into the other four. Yet, the map still wasn’t re-written. Even now, scientists are learning and updating the database on what the tongue can taste and how – including categories like “fatty” and “metal” and even “water”.

So, while the taste buds are not grouped into sections based on the flavor they can taste, some taste buds may have a greater affinity or sensitivity to a certain type of flavor.

It is estimated that we have about 2000-4000 tastebuds, and since the surface of the tongue is like your skin, the tastebuds recycle about every week or two. This rapid and continuous recycling might be why it is acclaimed that your taste (preference and enjoyment from your taste buds) changes approximately every seven years.

Conclusion

Even though the tastebud categories are still too complicated to rewrite the map, I still plan to use my taste buds to their fullest potential. Eat up!

Resources

I gathered some of my information from a PubMed article that is actively being updated by real scientists – How Does Our Sense of Taste Work?

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Music Credits: Up In My Jam (All Of A Sudden) by – Kubbi https://soundcloud.com/kubbiCreative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported— CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…Music provided by Audio Library https://youtu.be/tDexBj46oNI

Your Tongue – Episode 105

November 6, 2017 in Podcasts tagged anatomy / eat / extrinsic / glossus / intrinsic / muscles / organ / skin / speech / swallow / tongue by Cynthia Hendrix

Tongue Basics

Your tongue is made up of eight muscles. This is why it is called a muscular organ. It is the most important articulator in speech production. (A brief word dissection: articulate means to communicate something clearly. In medicine, articulate means to make a connection. It all makes sense!)

The tip is called the apex. The crease down the middle is called the median lingual sulcus. There is another crease at the back of your tongue and it is called the sulcus terminalis.

Tongue Muscles

The tongue has two types of muscles. Extrinsic muscles attach to bones boarding the mouth. Intrinsic muscles are completely contained inside the tongue borders.

Extrinsic Muscles

These muscles are responsible for moving your tongue front to back and side to side. There are four of them and they are named for the facial bones that they are anchored to.

The genioglossus muscle moves it forward so you can stick it out of your mouth.
The Hyoglossus muscle pulls it back and presses it down.
The Styloglossus muscle raises the sides of it during swallowing.
The Palatoglossus muscle raises the back of it during swallowing. It also presses the soft palate down and squeezes the palatoglossal arch inward during that same step of swallowing.

Intrinsic Muscles

These muscles are responsible for all the shapes and movements your tongue makes when you talk and eat.

The superior longitudinal muscle covers the top side.
The inferior longitudinal muscle covers the bottom side.
The vertical muscle fibers are in the middle and connect the superior to the inferior muscles.
The transverse muscle fibers start at the median sulcus and connect to the outer edges.

The Tongue Has Skin?!

The surface of your tongue is known as the masticatory mucosa, which basically means it’s the surface that food comes in contact with. The surface is made up of epithelial cells just like your skin. The cells are keratinized (or filled with a toughening protein) so it is tough and does not get damaged by the wide variety of things we eat.