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?

Question

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?

In: 111

Answer 1

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