Regarding taste and smell, if you can only restore one organ function first, which function do you want to restore first?
Let’s do a little test first: pinch your nose, eat chocolate or drink coffee. Although you can feel the sweetness, it will feel different from usual, and the taste will not seem as strong as usual.
1. Slow tongue
The sense of taste is produced through taste receptor cells. Taste receptor cells are concentrated in taste buds. The most important organ for us to feel the deliciousness of food is the tongue. However, the tongue, as the human taste organ, is a bit slow. With the tongue alone, we can only perceive sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, salty and limited flavors derived from their mixture.
2. The nose is not equal to the sense of smell
We usually think that the nose is the organ of the sense of smell, but in fact the nose is just an external organ of the sense of smell. It is only an auxiliary organ for the production of the sense of smell. The real sense of smell is the olfactory organ located at the top of our nasal cavity and slightly higher than the height of the eyes. It has three parts, the mucus layer, the olfactory epithelium and the supporting layer. The olfactory epithelium is the olfactory organ that plays a major practical role.
3. The sense of smell is greatly underestimated by humans
When people eat, the touch of the tongue and food is more direct and real, so we tend to attribute the production of taste to "taste", but greatly ignore the existence of the sense of smell. The tongue can only taste limited tastes. Only when used in conjunction with the sense of smell can it provide more information to the brain, and our perception of the taste of food will be more comprehensive. According to scientific experiments, the sense of smell is stronger than the sense of taste. There are about 10 million, at least 384 different kinds of olfactory cells distributed on only 1.5 square centimeters of mucous membrane above the nasal cavity.
4. Indistinguishable taste and smell
In real life, human beings are very sensitive to audio, visual and tactile sensations, but they cannot distinguish between taste and smell. Research has found that when testing taste and smell, when the interval between the two stimuli is 0 seconds, 0.1 seconds, 0.2 seconds, 0.3 seconds or even longer, the subjects' judgment of the two stimuli is "occurring at the same time". Only when the interval is 1 second, some people can distinguish which is the taste stimulus and which is the olfactory stimulus.
Finally, the editor would like to ask everyone, COVID-19 symptoms are recovering in progress. Faced with the temptation of delicious food, do you want to restore your sense of taste or smell first?
