On average, the human tongue has 2,000–8,000 taste buds and they only live for 10 days. On Mr. Dan’s blog you can do a taste testing experiment with two simple ingredients, an apple and potato.

Taste Testing Your Tastebuds

We all know that some foods taste better than others but what gives us the ability to experience all these unique flavors? This simple experiment shows that there’s a lot more to taste than you might think.

What you need
small piece of peeled potato
small piece of peeled apple ( same shape as the potato so you can’t tell the difference)

Instructions

1. 1.       Cut your pieces of potato and apple.
2. 2.       Close your eyes and mix up the piece of potato and the piece of apple so you don’t know which is which.
3. 3.       Hold your nose and eat each piece, can you tell a difference?

What’s happening?
Holding your nose while tasting the potato and apple makes it hard to tell the difference between the two. Your nose and mouth are connected through the same airway which means you taste and smell food at the same time. Your taste buds can recognize salty, sweet, bitter, and sour, but when you combine this with you sense of smell you can recognize many other individual ‘taste’. Take away your smell and you limit your brains ability to tell the difference between certain foods.

We would love to hear what you discovered from this experiment by leaving a comment.

Information provided by Wikipedia