Your Tongue Can Smell?

Random facts are always fun, like the fact that if you’ve smelled it you’ve tasted it….go ahead and let that bounce around in your head for a bit and you’ll realize some really disturbing things that you’ve tasted without wanting to.  Turns out our tongues can smell things.  According to a livescience.com article our tongues seem to have the ability to smell.  A new paper, published online April 24^th, in the journal Chemical Senses, shows that taste and smell seem to be linked in the surface of your tongue.  Some researchers at the Montell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit research institution in Philadelphia, grew human taste cells (would’ve been cooler if they had just grown a tongue on the back of a rat) in a lab.  Once they started poking around they discovered the tongue had some of the kind of cells found in your nose like the ones responsible for sensing smells and that they responded the same way when exposed to odor molecules.

The two main things you should take from this “Science for Tawny’s” look at a significant anatomical discovery is 1.  If you’ve smelled it you’ve tasted it, so yes….poop…. and 2.  Now it’s time to go home and set up a hillbilly experiment to test this theory.  Plug your nose up, get out some stuff that has a distinct smell; cheese, orange, mint, ect… and see if you can tell which is which with your tongue smellers.

https://www.livescience.com/65308-your-tongue-smells-like-a-nose.html