What Have You Learned About Your Taste, Smell and How Your Skin Feels

This unit we have been talking about the senses and how they work, mainly taste, smell and touch or feel.

Taste: Your tongue is the muscle you use to taste foods. The tongue can taste anything anywhere, and the myth about you being able to taste certain flavors on certain parts of your tongue was fake, and there is not tongue map. Foods have chemicals in them that are absorbed by your taste buds, which are little "bumps" all over your tongue that absorb the taste chemicals, and send a message to your brain, telling you what the flavor is, either sweet, sour, bitter, salty or (according to the brainpop video) umami.

Smell: Your nose is what is used to smell, and when you smell something, what happens is particles of the thing are going up into your nose, where you have hairs called cilia, that have chemical receptors. When a molecule hits a hair, it sends a message or signal to something called your olfactory bulb, which is an extension of the brain that detects different odors

Feel:The last one is feel or touch. Our skin can detect pressure, temperature and pain. To feel these things, we have nerves under our skin that can sense the different things. These nerves are called dermis and they send the different sensations to your spinal cord, which forwards it on to your brain. The more nerve endings there are in a certain body part, the more sensitive it is. Mechanoreceptors are what let you feel pressure (including pain) and vibration, as well as thermoreceptors, which allow you to feel temperature.