EXPLORIT Science Center - Weekly Column

Valentines Day was this week and many of us indulged in eating delicious chocolate treats. How does our tongue detect sweet tastes versus bitter, sour and salty ones? Did the smells of chocolate wafting up as you opened your box of chocolate enhance your sense of taste? How does color affect taste? Did you know that chocolate pudding before the addition of coloring can be a martian green color?

Visit Explorit Science Center’s current exhibition, “What a Shock! The Human Nervous System” partially sponsored by Kaiser Permanente, to try different activities about our five senses. You will also have the opportunity to learn about the basic physiology of the human nervous system, such as the brain, spinal cord and nerves. Discover how all five of your senses work and then try Explorit’s illusion activities to see if you can “fool” your senses.

Your tongue, one of the strongest muscles in your body, is also the organ of taste. There are about 10,000 taste buds on our tongues that are working hard to detect certain chemicals in the foods we eat.

The taste bud is composed of taste receptor cells (part of your nervous system) with very thin hair-like projections called microvilli. Your four primary sensations of taste—salty, sweet, bitter and sour—stimulate the microvilli contained in a pore on the surface of your mouth. This stimulation message is then sent to the brain.

Different chemical compounds stimulate the different taste buds. Your sweet taste buds will detect the relative amount of sugar in foods, while your sour taste buds detect the level of acidity in food such as found in vinegar. The salty taste buds are stimulated by almost any ion (i.e. calcium and sodium), which is why people on restricted diets can substitute other types of salts. Lastly, your bitter taste buds actually provide you protection by detecting the poisons in foods such as the alkaloids in some plants.

Stop by Explorit to see “What a Shock! The Human Nervous System” and try your hand at figuring out where on your tongue you sense the four primary tastes. You can progress through activities experimenting with your own tongue to discover the answers!

Guess what? Not all creatures have taste buds on their tongues or in their mouths. Many insects, such as the common housefly and butterfly, have taste buds on their feet to enable them to “taste” something as soon as they land. Creatures also differ in the amount of taste buds they have; chickens have the lowest amount at 24, while catfish have more than 175,000.

Did you know that your sense of taste can be altered by several factors? Temperature, color, smell and what you tasted before may all create changes in the way your taste buds work.

Here is a little experiment to test if temperature makes a difference in your taste senses. Break a chocolate bar in half and put one half in the freezer overnight and leave the other half out at room temperature. The next day take a bite of the chocolate from the freezer and one from the room temperature bar. Did one taste better than the other?

Both color and smell can also affect the taste of food. The food industry knows that color and appearance make a difference in taste; they use food dyes a lot to make foods look the way we expect them to. Add some green or blue food coloring to milk and ask a friend to describe its taste (food coloring is tasteless).

When someone is cooking in the kitchen and it smells wonderful, can’t you almost taste it! A large part of what we consider taste is really influenced by smell. In fact, many scientists actually think that smell is the biggest component to taste, not your taste buds.

Do not miss out on this fun, exciting and educational opportunity in Davis. Attend Explorit Science Centers newest exhibition, “What a Shock! The Human Nervous System” and be shocked at all you can learn about your senses.

Explorit Science Center is located at 3141 5th Street in East Davis. The current exhibition is What a Shock! The Human Nervous System. Public hours are Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Sunday from 1:00 to 4:30 p.m., and Tuesday through Friday from 2:00 to 4:30 p.m. Regular admission is $3; members, teachers (with school ID) and children under 4 are free.

Explorit Science Center Weekly Column