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
It was a mistranslation and a misinterpretation of the data. There is some difference in the taste buds across the tongue but it is not significant. However when the scientific papers were translated from German to English to be taught in English universities these differences were taken out of proportion. Further misinterpretation of this paper by textbook writers had them write that the tongue map showed exclusive areas for the taste buds. And because this was considered a fact nobody thought to challenge it. And because it was not a very important area of research nobody got the funding to do further research on this.
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