When a flavor hits the tongue, it activates a taste cell — for sweet, salty, bitter, sour or umami (savory).
That taste cell then passes the delicious message on to a brain cell so your brain knows whether the mouth is tasting cake or steak. When those taste cells die — and they do — new ones take their place. How do those new cells find the right brain connections without getting mixed up? They send a specific, irresistible chemical summons, a new study shows.Your tongue is a constantly changing landscape. The surface is covered in taste buds, and each bud is filled with a mix of different types of taste-receptor cells. The base of each taste cell in the bud is linked to a long tail called an axon. That axon is part of a brain cell, or neuron, located in a bundle of cells just behind your ear. This cell bundle takes the information from each taste-receptor cell and passes it along. This allows our brains to taste the difference between apples and anchovies.
The cells in your taste buds make direct contact with everything that ends up in your mouth. Along the way, they may get burned or poked or bitten. So each cell only lives a short time. How short? Perhaps only about one to three weeks. As the cells die off, new ones emerge to take over for the old ones.
Those new cells have to hook up to the proper neurons.
“You don’t want bitter-taste-receptor cells hooking up with a sweet neuron,” explains Hojoon Lee. He is a neuroscientist — someone who studies the brain — at Columbia University in New York City. New sweet-taste cells need to link to sweet neurons. Bitter ones must join up with bitter neurons. If, by accident, some bitter-taste-receptor cell did link up to a sweet neuron, Lee says, the animal or person might mistake bitter things — which often are poisonous — for a harmless sweet food. And that could be a potentially deadly mistake.How do the new taste-receptor cells find the right neurons? “I thought there must be something those taste receptor cells had which ensured miswiring wouldn’t happen,” Lee says….
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