While the tip of the tongue is said to pick up on sweet flavors, you can lick a pretzel and taste salt or lick a lemon and taste sour. The tongue diagram that originated in 1901 is far from ...

The map’s mistakes are easy to confirm. If you place a lemon wedge at the tip of your tongue, it will taste sour, and if you put a bit of honey toward the side, it will be sweet.

The tongue map is thought to have originated from a misinterpretation of a 1901 study, which noted minor variations in taste sensitivity across the tongue.

1 Remember the tongue map you learned about in junior high—the one showing taste receptors for sweet flavors on the tip of the tongue, bitter in the back, and sour on the sides? It’s totally wrong. 2 ...

The new work maps the structure of the human sweet taste receptor in unprecedented detail, to a resolution as good as 2.8 angstroms. In comparison, the smallest atom, hydrogen, is slightly more ...

So, while the tongue lacks a taste map, it can, in some people, look like a map—and be read like an atlas by doctors in order to make a wide range of different diagnoses.

An electronic tongue that can replicate flavours like cake and fish soup could help recreate food in virtual reality, but can’t yet simulate other things that influence taste, such as smell.

Scientists map tongue's sweet sensor, ... The new work maps the structure of the human sweet taste receptor in unprecedented detail, to a resolution as good as 2.8 angstroms.