Familiarity often causes people not to consider the tongue as a special organ. For instance, Western medicine focuses more on ...

It's the muscle we use every day for speaking, swallowing and tasting. But our tongue could also be an important indicator of ...

Inflamed taste buds, commonly manifesting as enlarged or swollen taste buds on the back, tip, or side of the tongue, can be a surprising source of both discomfort and concern. While these tongue bumps ...

TOPLINE: A new analysis found that mean radiation dose to the tongue mucosa did not improve predictions of taste impairment in patients with head and neck cancer (HNC) compared with mean dose to ...

More by Simon Makin This article was originally published with the title “Electronic Tongue” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 332 No. 2 (February 2025), p. 12 ...

Licking this “lollipop” will let you taste virtual flavors It produces nine flavors: Sugar, salt, citric acid, cherry, passion fruit, green tea, milk, durian, and grapefruit.

Transient lingual papillitis causes bumps, called lie bumps, to form on the tongue. They are larger than taste buds and have a raised rounded appearance. A person may identify them as blisters.

The traditional taste map of the tongue that is taught in school is a myth. The idea that tastes like salt and sweet are perceived in neatly defined areas of the tongue is wrong, or at best, a ...

The tongue diagram that originated in 1901 is far from accurate and there’s so much more to how humans perceive what goes in our mouths. The tip of the tongue is dense with sweet receptors, but ...

The taste bud diagram, used in many textbooks over the years, originated in a 1901 study but was actually showing the sensitivity of different areas of the tongue.

As with taste perception via the tongue, we’re still at quite an early stage in our understanding of how the brain combines different chemical signals into what we experience as flavors.