what exactly is taste? Just like vibration or light, what does a thing have or lack to determine taste and how do we process it?
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Vision is more or less just four sensors. One senses how similar to blue light a frequency is, one senses how similar to green, one to red, and the last just detects any of them.
Taste is similar, in a way. You have sensors for all sorts of chemicals, and those sensors will detect anything else that happens to be the right shape to interact with them. Really, what you’re sensing is just “how well does this molecule interact with my smell receptors”.
Our bodies are made up of cells. Some cells communicate to other cells using chemicals and electricity. These are called neurons.
Your eye contains neurons that respond to being hit by light. Some of these eye neurons respond to brightness and others respond to color. This information is relayed from your eye neurons to your brain.
You have neurons that do something similar on your tongue. These neurons get excited when they come into contact with tastes that are either salty, sweet, sour, bitter, or savory. Like your eye neurons, your tongue neurons will then relay this information to your brain when they are triggered by these flavors.
Chemical receptors.
The classic analogy is the “lock and key” image. The key is a chemical from your food, and the lock is a chemical receptor on your taste buds. When the flavor chemical finds the right “lock”, it connects and turns a “switch”; a small nerve impulse goes to the brain to indicate which receptor was activated.
We have a lot of different types of receptors in our taste buds, like sweet or salty, and the combination they’re activated in tells the brain what you’re tasting. You have similar receptors in your nose for scent, and the brain uses those to help identify whatever you put in your mouth.
It’s a biochemical reaction that leads to a neural feedback.
The taste buds in a particular section on your tongue react to the chemical in the food you eat (ex citric acid in a sour candy) and one activated, those taste buds provided a feedback to your brain. Instinctively, this causes your face muscles to contort as a reaction.
Different chemicals react differently to different parts of your tongue and hence, produce a different taste. Sucrose/glucose/fructose are all sugars and since biologically your body loves simple sugars, they taste pleasant and the neural pathways in your brain makes them something we crave. Sour and bitter (most acids and alcohols) are generally foods that are poisonous and are to be avoided in nature so our body’s reaction is to different.
It’s the detection of chemicals. Smell works the same way. Basically, certain shapes of molecules will attach to certain receptors on your tastebuds (or in your nose) and that triggers a nerve that tells your brain which receptor went off, and your brain interprets that as a taste.
It’s not perfect, though. Certain lead compounds can taste sweet, which is why children sometimes eat lead paint chips, they taste it, and it’s sweet, so they eat more. This is because the lead compound has a similar shape to that of sugars that would normally trigger those receptors. Artificial sweeteners work the same way, just without the lead.
Imagine your tongue is covered in holes of different geometric shapes like one of those old red and blue fisher-price orb toys with the yellow shapes.
Each shape is a chemical (food) and it fits in one hole. Every time one of the holes is filled by the corresponding shape it tells the brain. That signal is what we perceive as taste.
Roughly
I don’t think anyone here has really answered the question. What is taste? Well, light is the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, within a set range of detection you get sight. Sound is pressure waves. Taste is the shape of molecules. That’s what it is. Same as smell, smell is also the shape of molecules. The receptors bind to molecules that have the correct shape to fit into them. This is how we can manipulate taste with artificial flavors, chemicals that are wildly different in properties but still elicit the same taste.
Tastes are the result of chemical reactions that introduce ion (or lone electron) migration of one sort or another, and thus make electrical signals. For example, sour is the taste we recognize from acidity: the introduction of acid (H+) causes chemical changes in certain receptors that cause migration of electrochemical (nerve) signals.
The exact chemistry varies of course depending on the particular taste, and the brain does interpretation of the wide amount of electrochemical signals it receives from the various receptors, but the basic idea is that taste is the result of chemical interactions on the surface of the tongue. The brain also considers inputs from our smell detection system, so not usually just “taste”, really more a complex mix of smell and taste.
Worth adding on, a lot of what we tend to **think** of as taste is really smell. Blocking your nose can significantly reduce the amount that you “taste” in food.
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