Taste

Abstract

When we eat or drink we perceive a sensation that is often described as taste. A better term for it would be flavour, because the experience is made up of different modalities of sensation. Amongst these modalities are those of smell, touch (texture), temperature, and, of course, the chemical sense of taste. In this paper only the sensations of oral chemoreception will be described. The distribution and the morphology of the chemoreceptors within the oral cavity, the mechanisms involved in the transduction of the signal and the central connections of the nerve fibres innervating the receptors will be discussed.