Tip of the tongue: tasting is brain's job

Tip of the tongue: tasting is brain's job
Taste itself is focused on distinguishing chemicals that have a sweet, salty, sour, bitter, or umami taste.
However, interactions between the senses of taste and smell enhance our perceptions of the foods we eat.

Tastants, chemicals in foods, are detected by taste buds, special structures embedded within small protuberances on the tongue called papillae. Other taste buds are found in the back of the mouth and on the palate.

Every person has between 5,000 and 10,000 taste buds. Each taste bud consists of 50 to 100 specialized sensory cells, which are stimulated by tastants such as sugars, salts, or acids. When the sensory cells are stimulated, they cause signals to be transferred to the ends of nerve fibers, which send impulses along cranial nerves to taste regions in the brainstem. From here, the impulses are relayed to the thalamus and on to a specific area of the cerebral cortex, which makes us conscious of the perception of taste.

but... 
A recent experiment on rats manipulated the gustatory neurons in the brain demonstrating that rats could be fooled into thinking they were eating something sweet when they were being fed something salty.

How's this sounding McDonald's? 

Paper:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15763.html#videos

Photo via Wikipedia Commons

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