Scientists have built a "flavor map" of the brain
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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For the taste sensations in our brain is not the complex of multifaceted neurons, as was thought, but a set of clusters of nerve cells responsible for some specific taste.
Taste sensations go the same way as visual, auditory and other, from the receptor cell to a specific area in the brain, the taste analyzer. It is assumed that each taste (bitter, salty, sweet, etc.) corresponds to an individual receptor. In experiments on mice, the reaction of animals to artificial stimulation of the "bitter" receptors differed from that of stimulation of the "sweet" receptors. But what happens next, where the nerve impulse from the taste receptor comes, remained unclear for a long time. The areas of neurons that are excited with different taste sensations overlapped, which made scientists present the taste analyzer as a group of nerve cells with a wide, nonspecific field of action.
Nevertheless, the presence of strictly specialized neurons did not allow researchers to quiesce: is the signal really transmitted from a specific receiver to a "general" analyzer? Scientists from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (USA) injected calcium-sensitive dye into the neurons of mice, which began to fluoresce in response to changes in the content of calcium ions. Activity is accompanied by a transfer of ions between the cell and the external environment, and in response to taste stimulation, scientists could see exactly which neurons in the brain it "felt". The method made it possible to simultaneously monitor the state of hundreds of nerve cells.
And it turned out that when the mouse tried something bitter, it led to the activation of a certain group of neurons, but if the animal switched to saline, then the neurons that were several millimeters from the first, "bitter", awakened in response. And so with all the gustatory sensations. As a result, researchers managed to build a "taste map" of the brain with non-overlapping areas responsible for different tastes, which the authors write in the journal Science.
Thus, the taste sensations do not differ from others in the sense of their final processing by the central analyzer. The same functional maps exist for other sense organs; Thus, sounds of different heights are distributed in the brain through different neural sections of the auditory analyzer. As there is communication of such sites, as a result of which we feel some complex taste, it remains to be seen. Although advanced culinary experts and chefs probably would not mind speeding up research in this direction.