An organ equal to the task…

[30 January 2009 - 09h54]

An organ equal to the task

Extremely mobile and flexible and about 10 cm long, this bodily organ plays a key role, particularly in relation to eating. It is of course, the tongue.

Located in the centre of the mouth and connected to the base of the pharynx, the tongue is composed of a multitude of sensory receptors known as papillae. It really is amazing.

The tongue is the focus of some of the body’s greatest technology. First of all, in purely “mechanical” terms, it is in a sense to the mouth what the fingers are to the hand. The tongue moves food around to facilitate it mixing with saliva. But that’s not the whole story by any means. It also plays a part in creating the food bolus by compressing food against the palate before moving it to the pharynx and down towards the oesophagus on its way to the stomach. In addition, the way we position our tongue in our mouth allows us to produce different sounds – in other words… to speak.

But the tongue is also associated with taste. The papillae that form it are where the taste signals originate that enable us to distinguish between sweet and salt, for example. Classified by shape –foliate, calciform and fungiform– the papillae contain our “taste buds” These act as sensory receptors, transmitting chemical information to the brain about the taste characteristics of food present in our mouth. This is a very specialized task, shared of course by the senses of sight and smell, which also play an indirect role in the elaboration of taste.

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