Can you trick your taste buds? Check it out!

This morning, while I was searching for some teaching materials on the net, I came across an interesting article about our taste buds. After 31 years of living on earth, I just got to know that we can trick our taste buds. How? Read this article written by Nick Somoski on Helium

Is it possible to trick the taste buds?

The taste buds are one of the body's most peculiar features. It's almost hard to believe that these little "dots" on our saliva-filled tongues allow us to differentiate between the tastes of the foods we eat. But, it's true. Taste buds are the tiny organelles on our tongues that pick up the flavors in food and drink. They tell our brain what flavor we're tasting, which essentially tells us what we're eating and whether we like it or not.

But just like a smart magician, the taste buds can be tricked. While they do tell sweet from sour and hot from cold, taste buds can often confuse these aspects of taste.

It's often said that our sense of smell is directly related to our sense of taste. Our nose is the first thing that convinces our taste buds what the food tastes like. An experiment can be done to prove this, with 2 simple foods that have completely different tastes and smells.

Let's use two foods that have strong, completely different flavors: onions and lemons. Onions tend to have no distinct flavor but a very strong smell, while lemons have a very strong, sour flavor. What you do is take a piece of both, put the onion as close to your nose as possible, smell it, and put the lemon into your mouth. As you eat the lemon, you'll probably notice something strange: it tastes like onion.

What you have done is something magnificent - you have actually tricked your taste buds. The fact is, smell is directly related to taste. Your nose picked up the smell of onion, and although you were eating the lemon, the onion smell translated into an onion taste.

Our taste buds don't have very good resolution. At best, they're able to distinguish between bitter or sweet, salty or sour, or savory. Our noses are much better. They can extricate over 10,000 different smells. In fact, many things we think we're tasting are actually scents passing through our nose to our mouths and into our taste buds.

By holding the onion up to your nose, while tasting the lemon, we are able to prove that we're fooling our brain into thinking that the lemon tastes like onion, and that our taste buds are in fact being fooled.

In another instance, tricking our taste buds can be purely psychological. You can convince yourself that you hate a certain food, even without having tasted it. Our brains our convincing our taste buds that we don't like that food and that we don't have to taste it to find out. But, it's nothing more than psychological. By this, what we see is what is tricking our taste buds into thinking something.

Tricking the taste buds can become useful in many occasions. It's a fun thing to do and an interesting thing to know. Indeed, it is possible to fool our taste buds. If you'd like to try it, go ahead. I don't see any harm in doing so - of course, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to do the lemon/onion experiment all day long, as this can do serious damage to your taste buds. Simply enough, it is possible to trick the taste buds.

Hmmmm.... Can I trick my taste buds to taste lemon like KFC? I wonder... Dare to try?