So you don't know what taste is? Well I'll friggin' tell you what it is!
Taste refers to the ability to detect the flavour of substances such as food and poisons, and is one of the traditional five senses. First off, there are five (not four) sensation types: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and the most recently identified "umami", which refers to savoury tastes. Inside your mouth are what are known as taste buds, each one a tiny collection of cells designed to pick up the flavour of the food you are chewing. Humans are born with about 10,000 of these sensory organs, and your body replaces them about every two weeks.
Here is a basic model to show what goes on when you taste. First, your taste buds have to be exposed to something such as food or drink. Contact with the food or drink stimulates your taste buds, which send a signal to your brain that it's time to taste. The brain then distinguishes between the five sensation types. Taste buds that are sensitive to the specific sensations will send signals along special encoded nerves straight to the brain. The brain then receives the signal from the taste buds and recognizes them as flavours. The brain remembers the flavours you've tasted before. If the flavour you taste is a new one, the brain will store it in your memory so it can be recognized in the future.
A common misconception of taste is the so-called "tongue map". The notion that the tongue is mapped into four areas - sweet, salty, sour, bitter - is wrong. There are five basic tastes that have been identified, and the entire tongue can sense all of these tastes more or less equally. This myth is generally attributed to the mistranslation of a German text, and perpetuated in North American schools since the early twentieth century.
Sources:
Moss, Meg. How Do We TASTE? December 2004. Ask Magazine. January 14, 2008.
Wanjek, Christopher. The Tongue Map: Tasteless Myth Debunked. August 29, 2006. Live Science. January 14, 2008
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