FT264

The myth

Humans experience each of the different tastes on different parts of the tongue.


The “truth”

You can still find “Tongue Maps” in books and on websites today, showing that sweet is tasted on the tip of the tongue, bitter at the back, and so on. You can even buy special sets of dedicated wineglasses, individually designed to channel the dominant flavours of different wines to the appropriate areas of the tongue. But it’s been known for a long time that all tastes can be detected wherever there are taste buds. Regular readers of this column will be unsurprised to learn that it’s all a historic misunderstanding. Early in the 20th century, studies showed that the tongue has zones of relative sensitivity to the different tastes – and ever since, that’s been misinterpreted as meaning that they could only be tasted in one zone each. In 1974, a scientist named Virginia Collings re-examined the theory, and found that sensitivity to the main tastes did vary around the tongue – but only insignificantly, and to a degree which is unnoticeable under normal conditions.


Sources

'Challenging the Tongue Taste Map', aromadictionary.com
'The Tongue Map: Tasteless Myth Debunked', LiveScience
'Tongue-maps are in Poor Taste', Times Online, 22 June 2009
'A Little Clarity on Wine Glasses', Winston's Wisdoms


Disclaimer

No doubt the orthodoxy on this matter will change again one day, as orthodoxies do, but the idea of the rigidly demarcated tongue is easily shown to be false by simply putting some sugar on the part of your tongue which the map says tastes only salt.