Compared with vision and audition, taste is relatively poorly developed in humans. People often attribute the pleasure of eating good food to the sense of taste, but more often it is the smell that induces enjoyment. You have noticed of course, that food resembles cardboard in flavour when a head cold congests your nasal passages. The tongue, which registers taste, is actually sensitive to a more handful of properties, notably salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. These properties are detected by the 10,000 or so taste buds that line the tongue: taste buds live only a few days and then are replaced by new ones. Different taste buds are sensitive to different sensory properties, and they not distributed uniformly on the tongue…For example, the tip of the tongue is more responsive to sweetness, the base of the tongue to bitterness. However, most individual taste buds actually respond to more than one taste, so a substance’s taste probably arises from the pattern of neutral activity across many taste buds…Of course, the tongue also senses the texture and temperatures of foods, which may add considerably to the enjoyment of eating.