(Wineglass makers rejoiced.) But the variations were small and insignificant. In 1974, a scientist named Virginia Collings re-examined Hanig's work and agreed with his main point: There were variations in sensitivity to the four basic tastes around the tongue. These numbers merely denoted relative sensitivities, but they were plotted on a graph in such a way that other scientists assumed areas of lower sensitivity were areas of no sensitivity. In 1942, Edwin Boring, a noted psychology historian at Harvard University, also apparently unfamiliar with Japanese cuisine, took Hanig's raw data and calculated real numbers for the levels of sensitivity. That's all.īad Medicine appears each Tuesday on LiveScience. Based on the subjective whims of his volunteers, he concluded that sensitivity to the four tastes varied around the tongue, with sweet sensations peaking in the tip, etc. Not familiar with Japanese cuisine, Hanig set out to measure the relative sensitivity on the tongue for the four known basic tastes. The tongue map dates back to research by a German scientist named D.P. There's considerable debate about the existence of a sixth taste receptor for fat, too. It is common in Japanese foods, particularly kombu, a type of sea vegetable similar to kelp, and in bacon and monosodium glutamate (MSG), which Ikeda isolated and patented.

Most scientists agree that there's a fifth distinct taste, called umami, identified by a Japanese scientist named Kikunae Ikeda in the early 1900s (and ignored by the West for most of the twentieth century). In fact, there's more to taste than sweet, sour, salty and bitter.

I failed for insisting I could taste sugar in the back of my tongue. The map has frustrated many a grade-schooler, including me, who couldn't get the experiment right in science class. For reasons unknown, scientists never bothered to dispute this inconvenient truth. The tongue map is easy enough to prove wrong at home.

Taste buds of tongue