[ELI5] do all similar flavors taste exactly the same?

Question

Weird title, but bear with me.

The tongue can perceive 5 different tastes. Smell accounts for much of what we perceive as flavor.

Those 5 tastes are sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and savory/umami.

What I want to know is if, for example, all sweet flavors taste the same as every other sweet flavor, varying only in intensity.

Best I could find is that sweetness from sugar has a much shorter duration than sweetness from artificial sweeteners.

In: 0

Answer 1

Taste is actually just the sensation of an array of receptors for hundreds of different molecules (your taste buds) and similar receptors for the 5 base tastes just happen to be neat each other, but you can definitely have a different sweet sensation for sugar then let’s say for sweeteners