SENSE: TASTE
The sense of taste is associated with this level. The English idiom speaks of the mouth watering, and it is the watery element which produces the saliva which makes this possible.
The sense of taste is therefore only possible because of the element of water.
Taste (or, more formally, gustation) is a form of direct chemoreception and is one of the traditional five senses. It refers to the ability to detect the flavor of substances such as food and poisons. In humans and many other vertebrate animals the sense of taste partners with the less direct sense of smell, in the brain's perception of flavor.
In the West, experts traditionally identified four taste sensations:
- sweet
- salty
- sour
- bitter
Eastern experts traditionally identified a fifth, called umami. More recently, psychophysicists and neuroscientists have suggested other taste categories (umami and fatty acid taste most prominently, as well as the sensation of metallic and water tastes, although the latter is commonly disregarded due to the phenomenon of taste adaptation.
Taste is a sensory function of the central nervous system. The receptor cells for taste in humans are found on the surface of the tongue, along the soft palate, and in the epithelium of the pharynx and epiglottis.
