The way we perceive the taste of sweet cotton candy or buttery popcorn is more involved than most people realize. It involves a connection between taste receptors, smell receptors, and the brain. For insight into how this process works, here’s a helpful guide.

How Does Our Sense of Taste Work?

Your tongue is covered in taste buds made up of specialized receptor cells. When you put a piece of food in your mouth, these will send signals to your brain about how it tastes. Your brain will interpret this taste stimuli in accordance with olfactory stimuli—your sense of smell—to determine the flavor and decide whether it’s satisfactory.

How Does Taste Work With Smell?

Taste and smell help prepare us for digesting food. If we smell and taste something appealing, it will trigger the salivary glands and digestive juices. The sense of taste and smell are very closely linked, as both use chemoreceptors to make sense of the chemical environment. Typically, these senses combine together in the back of the throat. As a result, if you have a stuffy nose and cannot smell, your sense of taste will be severely diminished.

What Are Some of the Different Tastes?

There are five primary taste sensations: salty, sour, sweet, bitter, and umami. For a while, a theory was floated that receptors for each taste were located on different parts of the tongue—forming a tongue map; however, that has lately been disproved.

There are parts of the mouth that are more sensitive to tastes in general. This is why you are more likely to taste the salt in popcorn when you place it on the tip of your tongue than if you toss it back.

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