Professional Documents
Culture Documents
.
.
.
.
Umami: the taste of glutamate (MSG) savory taste
in meat and cheese
A Theory Debunked
Since 1942, tongue maps like this one were
widely published and touted as an accurate
portrayal of where certain taste receptors
were located.
Papillae
Those bumps on our tongue
are called papillae.
Papillae help grip food while
your teeth are chewing. They
also have another special job
Taste Buds
Each taste bud contains a pore
that catches food _____________
Each taste bud pore has 50-100
taste receptor cells with antenna
like hairs that sense food
molecules
Taste
Taste receptors reproduce themselves every week or
two (this is why it hardly matters if you burn your tongue
with hot food).
As you grow older, the number of taste buds decreases,
as does taste sensitivity.
Taste
As with other senses, your __________
influence your brains response.
Olfaction
Our Sense of Smell
Pheromones
In many animals, the sense of smell is used for
communication. For example, insects such as ants and
termites and vertebrates such as dogs and cats
communicate with each other by secreting and detecting
odorous signals called pheromones especially to signal
sexual receptivity, danger, territorial boundaries, and food
sources.
We humans seem to use the sense of smell primarily in
conjunction with taste to seek and sample food, but some
evidence exists to suggest that people may also use sexual
pheromones as well as pheromones that help us identify
family members by smell.
For more information:
Fragrance Effects
Research suggests that pleasant scents may trigger pleasant moods
and give a boost to workers performance.
Social psychologist Robert Baron, who has studied these fragrance
effects, has patented and is marketing a device that emits pleasant
scents. Called PPS (Personal Productivity/Privacy System) it
combines fragrance release with a whitenoise generator and an air
filter.
After testing dozens of smells, Baron found that lemon and light floral
had broad appeal (pine was the least popular odor), and is marketing
discs producing these odors with the PPS.
On a much larger scale, Shimizu Corporation has also patented an
odordelivery for commercial buildings. For example, it pumps a
citrus odor through an office buildings ventilation ducts every two
minutes. The fragrance sense can be fundamental to controlling
conditions for office workers, says Junichi Yagi, a representative for
Shimizu. He cites a monthlong study of Japanese keypunchers in
which those who inhaled a lemon aroma make 54 percent fewer
errors than those who sniffed plain air. While the citrus odor seemed
to make people more alert, other smells, such as spiced apple,
seemed to aid relaxation.