Textbooks were wrong about how language works
Think for a minute about the little bumps on your tongue. You probably saw a diagram of those taste bud arrangements once in a biology textbook: sweet sensors on the tip, salty on both sides, sour in the back, bitter in the back.But the idea that specific tastes are confined to certain areas of the tongue is a myth that "persists in the collective consciousness despite decades of research debunking it," according to an article published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. The concept that taste is limited to the mouth is also wrong.The old diagram, used in many textbooks over the years, originated in a study published by David Hanig, a German scientist, in 1901. But the scientist wasn't suggesting that the various tastes are separated on the tongue. He was actually me...