Like Miley above, we are always trying to search for new tastes.
The problem is, our brain has been deceiving us about our tastes because of the myth that each area on the tongue is responsible for a taste sensation.
For years I believed that the tongue had certain areas for certain tastes. For example: Detecting bitterness at the back of your tongue and sweet flavours on the tip. My only rationale was that in caveman days, bitterness was a taste that often killed you so your body reacted by lifting the back of your tongue to stop the poison going down.
It seemed completely logical that when I broke down the different tastes of coffee, the bitterness was at the back, the sourness was on the sides and the sweet, fruity flavours were on the tip. Except, there was something that never quite made sense, I tasted bitterness on the sides of my mouth too. My brain told me that my tongue was wrong – what I had learned as a barista was that bitterness is only tasted on the back of my tongue, so what I was experiencing was actually SOURNESS. For a long time I was convinced that the bitter flavours on the side of my tongues were in fact, sour flavours.
It wasn’t until I was much older that I learned that I was right and the coffee world had mislead me. I WAS experiencing bitterness on the sides of my tongue – and the back, front and all around the outside.
The document explaining how the tongue maps all the different sensations was written in 1901 by David Hanig and was then translated by Psychologist Edwin G. Boring into English. The Original study showed a tongue map with 4 different sensations: Bitter, Sour, Salty, and Sweet. Each sensation was directly linked to an area on the tongue which seemed to show that each area was responsible for a specific sensation.
Here’s where it went wrong… The map wasn’t showing the areas responsible for the tastes, it was merely showing that in Hanig’s study, he found that there was a slight difference in the THRESHOLD of the taste. Meaning, you may experience the bitter flavours on the back of the tongue first but actually all four areas can equally detect the same taste. The sensitivity to the taste may be different on parts of your tongue, but the level of intensity is always the same which means it isn’t going to be sweeter on the tip of your tongue, you may just notice it more.
We can only assume this is why Miley always has her tongue out.
So there you have it, a hundred years of coffee drinkers are fooling themselves about where the tastes actually sit on their tongue.
PS. Another interesting note to add. The original study was actually trying to prove that no tastes are ever detected in the center of your tongue. This was confirmed again in 1974 by Virginia Collings who showed that yes indeed, the “taste belt” is around the outside of the tongue and can detect all sensations equally well.
For those of you who are interested – and can read German – here is the original paper written by David Hanig. Zur Psychophysik des Geschmackssinnes
