A Matter of Taste

By Unmesh Kher

Everyone knows the taste of sweet and sour, but what do hot and cold taste like? According to scientists from the Yale School of Medicine, temperature has its own flavors. Writing in the current issue of Nature, they report that warming the front of the tongue induces a suggestion of sweetness, and cooling it produces a salty or sour taste; chilling the back of the tongue, by contrast, creates a sour or bitter sensation. No one knows if these false taste sensations affect flavor, but experts suspect they are too faint for the brain to discern in the sensory din of a mouthful of well-seasoned food.

--By Unmesh Kher