why did people ever think that the tongue having different “taste areas” made sense?

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It’s something I vividly remember being taught in primary school – the tongue has areas which can only taste sweet, savoury, etc. and they showed us a diagram of where each area was on the tongue. It was the most easily disprovable idea and we all knew it made no sense…and lo and behold it turned out to be total nonsense. How did this idea ever make its way into curriculums and textbooks and did it ever have the backing of the science community? (Also, feel free to share the dumbest thing you were ever taught in school for comparison!)

In: Biology

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Probably the dumbest thing I was taught in school was the food pyramid. Not sure how it is now, but it used to say that breads should make up the vast majority of your diet, with fruits like apples and bananas in second place.

Now we have an epidemic of obesity, and half of everybody I went to school with has type 2 diabetes.

Edit: I forgot my numbers

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