If our tongue can sense basic tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, etc.), how does it sense more complex tastes, like taste of strawberry or taste of chocolate?

Question

If our tongue can sense basic tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, etc.), how does it sense more complex tastes, like taste of strawberry or taste of chocolate?

In: Biology

Answer 1

As another answer had mentioned, it’s our brain that does the work. For a horror story, just know that there exist people with neurological conditions that prevent them from synthesizing small chunk of basic information into bigger one. See this famous book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat

If you are willing to use multilayer perception (a type of artificial neural network) as a model of how the brain synthesize information, then it works something like this. Taste buds send signal to other neurons. These neurons received signal differently, so as to recognize most useful basic combination of taste on a small number of taste bud. Then they send signal further up, and the process is repeat, until eventually all information is synthesized.