TASTE

When we eat or drink we perceive a sensation that is often described a s taste. A better term for it would be flavour, because the experience is made up of different modalities of sensation. Amongst these modali ties are those of smell, touch (texture), temperature, and, of course, the chemical sense of taste. In this paper only the sensations of ora l chemoreception will be described. The distribution and the morpholog y of the chemoreceptors within the oral cavity, the mechanisms involve d in the transduction of the signal and the central connections of the nerve fibres innervating the receptors will be discussed.