Taste

I've decided that I want to be a teacher when I grow up, so I designed a lesson plan on how taste works as a practice. I wanted to show you guys in case you had any feedback for me!

 

 

 

Taste:



Whether you are eating potato chips or a chocolate bar, the first thing that happens when you put them in your mouth is a feeling of sensation. Tastes involves five different sensations.


The five sensations are:


Sweet

Sour



Salty



Bitter



Umami (Fresh chicken)
















Now that we know the five sensations associated with taste, let's discuss the tasting process, also known as gustation.


Firstly, taste, like smell, is a chemical sense. When you eat something, and the food you are eating touches your tongue, you taste the food. Hundreds of taste buds covering your tongue contain taste receptors. The taste receptors receive the food chemicals that are caught by the taste buds and they respond to the food by triggering a response that tells your brain whether you are eating something salty, sweet, sour, bitter, or umami.

Now that we have covered gustation, we can now talk about sensory interaction.

Sensory interaction is the idea that one sense can have an effect on the other. With taste, for example, smell often influences taste.  In order to perceive the taste correctly, you must first smell it. Without smelling the food, it is more difficult to distinguish, let's say, lemonade from iced tea. Another factor that may influence taste is texture. Peanuts and almonds are both crunchy and kind of smooth, someone who has never eaten an almond will find it hard to determine which one is which. Sensory interaction also explains the McGurk Effect. That is, when you see the mouth movements of a sound while hearing another sound, we can perceive a different sound similar to them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0


The video above explains the McGurk Effect in further detail.