Taste (sensation)

“ I shall only observe that no smells or tastes can produce a grand sensation, except excessive bitters, and intolerable stenches. It is true that these affections of the smell and taste, when they are in their full force, and lean directly upon the sensory, are simply painful, and accompanied with no sort of delight; but when they are moderated, as in a description or narrative, they become sources of the sublime, as genuine as any other, and upon the very same principle of a moderated pain. ”

“ The other concerns itself with the sensitivity to difference between tastes, and would be expressed by some such question as, How slight a change in the amount or intensity of the stimulus is required for one to be able to perceive a change in the intensity of the taste sensation?
Unfortunately for our knowledge of tastes, both these problems are very difficult to approach experimentally. Whether or not a given weak stimulus will provoke a taste sensation depends on very many things other than the strength of the solution. ”

“ We know that the flavour of things tasted is an olfactory sensation, Now while language attains to precision in characterising the sensations of pure taste, as we have just seen, it is significant that flavours are left unnamed, except in the manner we have just explained for olfactory epithets. ”

“ Analysis has been as successful in the sense of taste as in cutaneous sensation. Ordinarily we speak of an unlimited number of tastes, every article of food having its own characteristic taste. Now the interior of the mouth possesses the four skin senses in addition to taste, and many tastes are in part composed of touch, warmth, cold or pain. A "biting taste" is a compound of pain with taste proper, and a "smooth taste" is partly touch. The consistency of the food, soft, tough, brittle, gummy, also contributes, by way of the muscle sense, to the total "taste". ”

“ Flavor is something more than taste. It is in reality a mixed sensation, in which smell and taste are both concerned, as is shown by the common observation that one suffering from a cold in the head, which blunts his sense of smell, loses the proper flavor of his food. So if a person be blindfolded, and the nose pinched, he will be unable to distinguish between an apple and an onion, if one be rubbed on the tongue after the other. As soon as the nostrils are opened the difference is at once perceived. ”

“ They, like the palate, are gifted with a portion of the appreciative faculties; I do not know that, in certain cases, the nose does not participate, and if but for the odor which is felt in the back of the mouth, the sensation of taste would not be obtuse and imperfect.
Persons who have no tongue or who have lost it, yet preserve the sensation of taste. ”

“ Antecedent to the sensation of taste, there is generally some motion of the mouth, by which the object and the organ are brought into the proper position and state. The sensation can hardly be thought of without thinking of this motion, that is, of other feelings. Besides, the organ of taste is also the organ of another sense. The organ of taste has the sense of touch, and most objects of taste are objects of touch. Sensations of touch, therefore, are intimately blended with those of taste. ”

“ Taste is modified by age, temperament, habit, and disease; and in this it obeys the general laws of sensation. Children are pleased with the taste of what is sweet, and little stimulating; as we advance in years the taste of more stimulating substances becomes agreeable to us; so that we are admonished by this sense to take into the stomach the kind of nourishment fitted to each period of life. ”

“ As a rule mankind confuses the "taste" of things with their accompanying "smell." The finer flavours of food and drink not included in the four classes of tastes are really due to odoriferous particles present in the food or drink, which act on the terminations of the olfactory nerves in the recesses of the nose, and excite no sensation through the nerves of taste. ”

“ The numerous "tastes" of every-day life, though found on analysis to be compounded of taste, smell, touch, pain, temperature and muscle sensations, have the effect of units. The taste of lemonade, for example, compounded of sweet, sour, cold and lemon odor, has the effect of a single characteristic sensation. It can be analyzed, but it ordinarily appears as a unit. ”

“ The sensation, the simple feeling, affords the means of discriminating, judging, distinguishing, and to this latter power or process the word taste, in the physical sense, is more frequently appropriated. We say of such or such a man, his taste is acute, or his taste is impaired, or dull, etc., meaning his power of perceiving and distinguishing the various properties of objects which affect his sense of taste. ”

“ A peculiar instinct warns him of the necessity of food; he seeks and seizes the things which he knows are necessary to satisfy his wants; he eats, renovates himself, and thus during his life passes through the whole career assigned to him.
Taste may be considered in three relations.
In physical man it is the apparatus by means of which he appreciates flavors.
In moral man it is the sensation which the organ impressed by any savorous centre impresses on the common centre. Considered as a material cause, taste is the property which a body has to impress the organ and to create a sensation. ”

“ MEDITATION XII. GOURMANDS. ALL WHO WISH TO BE ARE NOT GOURMANDS. THERE are individuals to whom nature has refused a fineness of organs and a degree of attention, without which the most succulent food passes unperceived.
Physiology has already recognized the first of these varieties, by exhibiting the tongue of those unfortunate men who are badly provided with the means of appreciating flavors and tastes. Such persons have but an obtuse sensation, for to them taste is what light is to the blind. ”

“ But where the mind is weak and the delights of bodily sensation strong, the pleasures of taste or the charm of varied sensations in the palate dwell on the imagination and excite it to renewed indulgence of physical sensations, irrespective of the wants of the internal organism, and this even notwithstanding its declining health and manifest debility.” The morbid cravings of the sense of perverted taste, or any other sense, must not be confounded, therefore, with the natural appetite excited by the wants of the internal organism. ”

“ Taste is often associated with smell, giving rise to a sensation of flavour, and we are frequently in the habit of confounding the one sensation with the other. Chloroform excites taste alone, whilst garlic, asafœtida, and vanilla excite only smell. ”

“ Taste must, I believe, be excluded, for if we abstract the parts of touch and smell, even in those abnormal sexual acts in which it may seem to be affected, taste could scarcely have any influence. Most of our "tasting," as Waller puts it, is done by the nose, which, in man, is in specially close relationship, posteriorly, with the mouth. There are at most four taste sensations—sweet, bitter, salt, and sour—if even all of these are simple tastes. ”

“ One conclusion seems generally supported by the investigations of the distribution of taste, namely, that one cannot assert positively that wherever tastes have been definitely aroused there taste organs will be discoverable, or the converse of this, that wherever taste buds are found there taste sensations can always be aroused. ”

“ Taste sensitivity and the structure of the taste organs differ greatly in the mammals, but there seem to be two characteristics in common, namely, the localization of the taste corpuscles within the mouth and the importance of the tongue in arousing taste sensations. ”

“ Evolution of Taste Sensitivity of the Unicellular Organisms The study of the sense organ of taste in adult human beings consists of an examination of the taste sensations resulting from controlled stimulation of limited parts, supported by the microscopical examination of the structures found in the regions in which these taste sensations can be aroused. ”

“ There is an inseparable connection between the two senses of smell and taste, for when anosmia or loss of the sense of smell occurs, all taste, except for bitterness, sweetness, sourness, and saltness, is completely lost, so far as ideas of flavour, &c., are concerned. ”

“ Smell is that specialization of touch, uniquely delicate, supposed by Maeterlinck to be still in its earlier stage of development in human kind, which responds to the stimulus of those otherwise intangible exhalations called odor. Lastly, taste is touch specialized so as to discern the inner properties of food stuff; taste is the testing sense. Mere touch determines the existence, specialized [15] touch the character and niceties of matter of the physical universe. ”

“ We have slowly evolved a tongue and palate on the one hand, and French cooks and pâté de foie gras on the other. But while everybody knows practically how things taste to us, and which things respectively we like and dislike, comparatively few people ever recognise that the sense of taste is not merely intended as a source of gratification, but serves a useful purpose in our bodily economy, in informing us what we ought to eat and what to refuse. ”

“ Hence we are taught that the substances properly the objects of the sense of taste, are those only which produce sensations purely and exclusively gustative, perceived neither through the nose nor through the nerves of touch, but acting on the tongue and palate only. ”

“ Some women have it wonderfully."
"But, after all," said Francis, "why should appreciative delicacy of palate amaze us more than sharpness of vision or delicacy of touch?"
"Only because a fine taste is, of all forms of sensory acuteness, the rarest," returned Hamilton. "It is still more uncommon to have a perfect memory of taste, while odors are so easily remembered. ”

“ In reality, there are but four primitive and radical tastes—sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. A very simple experiment will convince us of this fact. If we keep the nostrils closed when tasting a certain number of sapid substances, so as to neutralize the sense of smell, the taste perceived is invariably reduced to one of the four simple savors we have just named. Then, whenever the pituitary membrane is out of order, the taste of food is no longer the same; the tongue distinguishes nothing but sweet, sour, salt, or bitter. ”

“ Developing as one of the earliest forms of sensitiveness, intimately associated with the vital processes of life and growth, affording manifold richness of pleasure and aversion, full of paradoxical surprises and puzzling problems, and figuratively expressing one of the rarest of human qualities, “the sense of taste” constitutes one of man’s most interesting contacts with the outer world. ”

“ Taste seems to nanifest itself in a preference or selection of what is agreeable to the ear, the eye, the touch, the smell, and the palate, and consequently does not exercise any influence over us in the common wants of life. ”

“ Moreover, the sense of taste is very dependent upon the sense of smell, especially in the case of aromatic and savory substances, which one really does not taste but smell. If one held his nose and closed his eyes he would not know from the taste whether he was eating onion or apple. ”

“ The same is the case with the young of animals, which readily distinguish tastes and seem astonished at new ones; and the newly hatched chicken will at once select the food, where it is given a choice, which is most agreeable to it. Taste is, then, the first sense which affords clear perceptions, and is the first which gives occasion for the exercise of the faculties of memory and judgment.
The sensations of smell can hardly be separated from those of taste. ”

“ But you will say at once, we taste many things that are neither sweet, sour, salt, nor bitter; there must be many more than four tastes. There are not. What we commonly call tastes are really smells. We smell things that are in the mouth, and think we taste them.
If you don’t believe this, simply hold your nose. It is an old trick to get somebody to close his nose tightly, and then while all sense of smell is thus cut off, to bring into the room a piece of raw onion, put it in the victim’s mouth, and ask him to guess what it is. ”

“ If you have tried how smooth globular bodies, as the marbles with which boys amuse themselves, have affected the touch when they are rolled backward and forward and over one another, you will easily conceive how sweetness, which consists in a salt of such nature, affects the taste ”

“ Similarly, without the sense of taste, sweet or sour has no meaning, and in like manner only those who can hear know what music is, and only those who have a sense of smell are able to enjoy the perfume of a flower. ”

“ The very diversity in taste proves its deep-down reality: preference and antipathy being consubstantial with the soul—nay, inherent in the very mechanism and chemistry of the body. And for this reason tastes are at once so universal and uniform, and so variously marked by minor differences. There are human beings all shank and thigh and wrist, with contemplative, deep-set eyes and compressed, silent lips ”

“ The lowest form of special sense is taste, which is closely allied to nutrition. Taste perceives the phase of assimilation of the object, which is commencing with the mouth. The individuality of the object is attacked and it gives way, its organic product or inorganic aggregate suffering dissolution—taste perceives the dissolution. Substances that do not yield to the attack [Pg 155] of the juices of the mouth have no taste. Glass and gold have little taste as compared with salt or sugar. ”