Taste

From Freepedia

Taste is one of the most common and fundamental of the senses of animals. It is the direct detection of chemical composition, usually through contact with chemoreceptor cells. Taste is very similar to olfaction (the sense of smell), in which the chemical composition of an organism's ambient medium is detected by chemoreceptors. In a liquid medium, taste is often used to describe this act as well.

In humans, the sense of taste is transduced by taste buds and is conveyed via three of the twelve cranial nerves. The facial nerve (VII) carries taste sensations from the anterior two thirds of the tongue, the glossopharyngeal nerve (IX) carries taste sensations from the posterior one third of the tongue while a branch of the vagus nerve (X) carries some taste sensations from the back of the oral cavity. Information from these cranial nerves is processed by the gustatory system.

As a general rule, taste is a global fuzzy assessment of the interaction of the fundamental taste systems of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami. Location of the stimulus on the tongue is not important, despite the common misperception of a "taste map" of preference for different tastes in specific areas of the tongue [1]. In reality, the separate populations of taste buds sensing each of the basic tastes are distributed across the tongue.

If half of the tongue is blocked from sending information to the brain, people will report that a doubling of psychological perception has occurred for sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.

See also Flavor

Taste in aesthetics

Main article Taste (aesthetics).

Taste can also refer to appreciation for aesthetic quality, significantly applying the purely physical term to an intellectual quality. Taste begins to be used in a metaphorical sense to refer to certain degrees of cultural competence, closely related to the concept of discrimination; it can set distinctions between tasteful and tasteless or embodying good taste or bad taste, thus providing categories for social division and producing cultural hierarchy.

The modern concept of "taste" is a product of the 16th century Italian Mannerism: the idea of "taste" as a quality that is independent of the style that is simply its vehicle — though the style might be designated a taste, such as "the Antique taste"— was born in the circle of Pope Julius III and first realized at the Villa Giulia built on the edge of Rome in 1551 - 1555.

To the Enlightenment, "taste" was still a universal character, which could be recognized by what pleased any cultured sensibility. With the shift in perspective that Romanticism brought, it began to be thought that, to the contrary, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and could be individually interpreted, with results that might be of equivalent aesthetic value.

Taste as a metaphor for experience or knowledge

To taste is also used metaphorically to describe having a small amount of experience with something that gives a sense of its quality as a whole. For example: "they had not yet tasted the sweetness of freedom" (Livy) or "I tasted in her arms the delights of paradise" (Voltaire). The word is often used as a noun in this sense, typically in such expressions as "I got a taste of it" or "It left a bad taste in my mouth."

See also

• Aesthetics
• Art
• Fine art
• Visual arts and design
• Connoisseur
• Critic
• Recommendation system (computer science)