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"A Bite of China"
A popular documentary in the past two years, "A Bite of China" has beautiful images, authentic content and a unique perspective. The content is a delicacy that everyone loves to see, which has greatly whetted the appetite of the Chinese people, and everyone is drooling while watching the TV.
Sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, and salty are all our taste experiences, the feelings given to us by the taste buds on our tongues.
The distribution of taste buds on the tongue
The taste buds on the tongue are divided. For example, sweetness can be felt at the tip of the tongue, salty taste can be felt at the sides of the tongue, bitterness can be felt at the base of the tongue, and sourness can be felt at the side of the tongue toward the middle.
Spicy is different from other tastes. Spicy is actually the pain of being torn apart on the tongue.
Taste buds are a type of receptor cells that are highly differentiated nerve cells. They have a special molecular structure on their surface that can react with chemicals in food. For example, the main salty substance is table salt, which is sodium chloride NaCl, chlorine. Sodium is hydrolyzed on the tongue and becomes sodium ions and chloride ions . The sodium ions and chloride ions can directly combine with the taste buds, causing the taste bud nerve cells to produce an enzyme cascade reaction, converting chemical signals into nerve impulse signals. It is transmitted to the taste nerve center of the brain through taste nerve fibers, so that we can feel the "salty" feeling. The other flavors are the same as this one.
Neural Network
So let’s think more deeply, what is the feeling of “salty”? Is saltiness the taste of salt itself?
What taste buds transmit to the taste nerve center are nerve electrical impulses, which are essentially electrical signals. Electric signals do not have the characteristics of "sweet, sour, bitter, spicy, salty".
The taste nerve center is a group of nerve cells. The nerve cells are interconnected by dendrites , axons , synapses , forming complex neural circuits and neural networks. The
neural network can classify different inputs. The most important thing is that there are some cells in the neural network that can mark the classified information, marking them as "sour", "sweet", "bitter", "spicy", "Salty" and other different symbols.
hallucination
Finally, the brain imagines these marked electrical signals as various flavors, telling itself that this taste is "sour" and that taste is "sweet".
The concept and experience of taste are all neural electrical signals, imagined by neural networks.
