The Second Book Of General Ignorance - Plot & Excerpts
The ‘tongue map’, once widely taught in schools, purported to show how each area of the tongue was solely responsible for one of ‘the four basic tastes’ – sweet, sour, bitter and salty. In fact, this is quite wrong. Wherever you have taste buds – all over the tongue and the roof of the mouth – you can detect all tastes more or less equally. Plus, there are more than four basic ones. According to the tongue map, the tip of the tongue tasted sweet things and the back, bitter ones. The sides of the tongue at the front were for tasting salt while the sides at the back did sour. The map was based on German research published in 1901 but an influential Harvard psychologist with the unfortunate name of Edwin Boring (1886–1968) mistranslated it. What the original research had shown was that the human tongue has areas of relative sensitivity to different tastes – but Boring’s translation stated that each could only be tasted in one zone. What is really mysterious about the tongue map is that it was the official truth for such a long time, even though it’s so easily disproved.
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