Artificial Tastes

Back in ancient times, [philosophers:intangibles] like Aristotle were already speculating about the origins of taste, and how the tongue sensed elemental tastes like sweet, bitter, salty and sour. "What we discovered just a few years ago is that there are regions of the brain - regions of the cortex - where [particular:specific] fields of neurons represent these different tastes again, so that's a sweet field, a bitter field, a salty field, etcetera." Nick Ryba, a sensory neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health.Ryba and his [colleagues:partners] found that you can actually taste without a tongue at all, simply by stimulating the "taste" part of the brain - the insular cortex. They ran the experiment in mice with a special sort of brain implant - a [fiber-optic:plastic] cable that turns neurons on with a pulse of laser light. And by switching on the "bitter" sensing part of the brain, they were able to make mice pucker up, as if they were tasting something bitter - even though [absolutely:definetely] nothing bitter was touching the tongues of the mice.