Talk:Tongue map

Disproven map

It would be useful if this article described to what degree the taste map has been dis-proven.

One of the article's references indicates that current research suggests certain areas of the tongue are still relatively more receptive to certain basic tastes. That the original research was misconstrued -- to mean that certain tongue regions have no sensitivity to certain tastes -- but the underlying premise -- that certain regions have differing relative sensitivities -- looks to be largely maintained... --Jeffschuler (talk) 17:17, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes, the century-old paper says exactly that: you can taste everything everywhere around the edge of the tongue, just not equally strongly.

To what extent has the taste map been disproven? Well, the taste map is right insofar as tastes have areas where they're strongest. It's wrong insofar as these areas differ from weak areas by very little. The taste map is too simplified a model, just like the flat earth is. It'd be "less wrong" (closer to the experimentally determined truth) to teach children that you can taste everything equally well all around the tongue.

I'm a native German, so I've been flipping through and reading parts of the original german paper. To my delight, the paper contains pretty pictures: a density map of the tongue surface for each of the four tested basic tastes, among other graphics. The maps indicate that the center of the tongue can not taste at all, but towards the edge (tip, sides, back), sensitivity increases. Each of the four tested tastes has its "dense" areas along the "edge", but the variation for each taste was small (or practically nothing, in the case of salt). The maps showed that the difference in sensitivity from edge to center of tongue is larger.

Convince yourself. Grab a knife, wet the tip, put some salt on it, and poke it around on your tongue. The center of my tongue doesn't taste the salt at all, but the tip, left/right sides and the back taste it just fine.

I'm a bit tempted to translate the paper into english and link it here. I might screw up the English and the medical terms, but I can understand 100-year-old German alright.

I doubt there was any "accidental mistranslation". I think someone just skimmed the paper (or received an abstract), ignored (!) all the pretty pictures, zeroed in on the statement of results, and applied their penchant for black-and-white thinking. Anyone with usable German who has actually read the D. P. Hänig paper could never have reached the conclusion that the tongue had any hard "zones" for basic tastes. --134.130.4.243 (talk) 19:48, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Merge with taste-map myth

• Support. Since there is no such thing as a taste map or a tongue map, I think the title "taste-map myth" is more appropriate. Fleetham (talk) 16:30, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Support. I agree with the above and the two topics are far too similar to warrant two different pages. Scientific29 (talk) 23:22, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

References

The first reference for this article is the New York Times, really? Come on. That article is complete shit anyway.

The New York Times is a perfectly reputable source. The article is fine. CrocodilesAreForWimps (talk) 15:03, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

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"exclusively"

Intro says "a common misconception that different sections of the tongue are exclusively responsible". I'm not sure about the use of the word "exclusively" there, since I don't think I was ever told that those zones were the only areas where those tastes worked, but rather that they were the most sensitive. But this is anecdotal so I was wondering whether this was true for other people as well. CrocodilesAreForWimps (talk) 14:56, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Taught in American high schools longer than the 1970s

Hello. I live in a small rural community. I graduated in 1999. I had to take biology in 1997 in order to graduate. We were exclusively taught the tongue map shown here, though using the paper method on ourselves, rather than partners. 174.126.55.25 (talk) 21:09, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

regions described

This is a great article. Very helpful. 174.212.224.178 (talk) 18:06, 26 November 2023 (UTC)