“It was very funny, because all of the stimuli were water,” she says. She put various fluids on people's tongues and then gave them water to see what happened: some of her subjects were certain the second fluid was flavoured with particular acids or sugars. And though it's just a phantom taste, it feels just as distinct and real as a sensation from direct stimulation of the receptor by a sweet fruit.īartoshuk remembers her very first experiment into these lingering after-effects. It's this sudden release that triggers a message to the brain, generating the sensation of sweetness. When you next drink a glass of water, however, the cynarin molecules are washed away, releasing the receptors. As you clear the table, wash the dishes, and move on to the next thing, the cynarin lurks on your tongue.
When you eat an artichoke, the cynarin quietly latches onto your sweet receptors without actually activating them. The key is a substance in the vegetable called cynarin, according to Linda Bartoshuk, a taste scientist now at University of Florida, who authored a Science paper on the phenomenon in 1972. And there's a lot that goes on between your taste buds and your brain to create the sensation of taste that is still foggy.īut the basics are enough to help you understand, for instance, what is happening with the artichoke. Stated that way, it sounds relatively simple, but researchers haven't figured out all the details of taste yet: sweet, bitter, and umami have fairly clear relationships to specific cell proteins, but exactly how our tongues detect saltiness and sourness is still a bit of a mystery. When something – a molecule in food you've eaten – hits them just right, a message shoots from the cell to the brain, causing one of the five taste sensations: sweetness, bitterness, sourness, saltiness, or umami. It's covered with little clusters of taste-sensitive cells, and each cell's membrane is studded with proteins that function, essentially, as doorbells. To understand why these foods mess with your mind, first think about your tongue. These little red West African berries make anything sour taste sweet – and it's a remarkably clean, pure sweetness. And for mind-bending parlour tricks, nothing beats miracle fruit. Drink a glass after brushing your teeth with toothpaste, and the normally sweet drink tastes foul instead. Eat one and then drink a glass of water and you might notice that the liquid tastes strangely sweet.
It's all because your taste buds respond differently when the environment around them shifts – an effect you can use to go on a little mouth-hacking tour. What you've just eaten can change the flavour of what you eat next – for better or for worse.
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