Do you ever wonder what your tongue feels like? Did you ever wonder whether you were tasting different things when you brushed your teeth or dipped a tampon in different flavors of hot chocolate? The taste bud is an extremely important sense for all of us humans. The sense of taste is actually one of the most complex sense, as it involves more than simply a single receptor, but a series of them. Taste buds are tiny sensory organs, which are located on the tip of each of your taste buds and enable you to taste various tastes, salt, sweet, bitter, and savory.
When you taste food, these tips (or papillae) are stimulated to allow the nerve endings to send signals to your brain. These nerves tell your brain that the food that you are tasting is sweet, bitter, salty, or sweet. So when you have a craving and go in search for that particular food, what happens in your body is that the taste buds on your tongue get stimulated and send a message directly to your brain telling your taste buds that a certain food is now available.
The taste buds themselves are tiny little hairs around your tongue, which are sensitive to gravity and the intensity of different tastes. Therefore, if the taste buds on the tongue get stimulated in this exact order, your tongue will taste sweet (towards the tip), salty (to the middle), and sour (towards the back). Also, this order affects the frequency with which your tongue experiences taste buds. For example, if you have one taste bud to taste sweet and then another to taste bitter, your tongue may only experience the sweet taste bud. Conversely, if you have three taste buds to taste sweet, two for salty and one for sour, your tongue will experience taste buds twice each of sweet and bitter.
Your brain then receives these “grips” in a series and gives signals to your taste buds telling them what tastes are available. These taste buds travel to your back of the throat where they are supposed to be at the most intense: sweet, salty, and sour. The problem occurs when your tongue gets mixed up between sweet, salty and sour. As your tongue travels up and down your throat, it picks up on sweet, salty and sour tastes from all directions.
Sweet taste buds are located at the front of your tongue while salty taste buds are located at the back. Sweet taste buds contain G-proteins and A-proteins. A-protein’s are much like amino acids that your body makes naturally. As you move your tongue over different foods, the G-proteins act on the surface of your tongue to trigger a reaction. Sweet tastes are concentrated in the back of your tongue where your taste buds are located.
On the other hand, salty taste buds are located at the back of the tongue. They also house bacteria which is important for your body’s digestion. As you eat spicy foods and hot foods, the bacteria in your mouth becomes active and sends signals to your taste buds telling them there is food to taste. These hot foods make your tongue register as a hot spot where there is more taste bud activity.
When the tongue taste bud membranes get hit with hot spots, they signal that food is coming down your throat faster than average. You can taste the sweetness, but you can’t taste the saltiness. This is why eating spicy foods can leave you with a burn in your throat and stomach as well as give you some unpleasant breath. That is why many people suffer from a dry cough when they eat certain foods that have strong tastes. Even some sweet foods can leave a dry feeling in the back of the throat.
You taste sweet, bitter, and salty through your nerves in your tongue, palate, and inner parts of your tongue. Through your lips you can only taste sweet, while the nerves in your lip palate send signals to your olfactory senses (that smell things) telling you if something is oily, fatty, or even a sweet. Your middle overall taste buds include the parts of your tongue that you can taste all three major tastes: sweet, bitter, and salty. These taste buds are located in the middle of your back near your throat. Your tongue’s job is to absorb everything it comes into contact with so it is not surprising that everything you come in contact with also gets absorbed by your tongue.