Do you know your tongue is the only muscle in your body with a nerve inside it?
The tongue is a movable muscle organ that resides inside the mouth and partially reaches the upper throat. The study of the tongue mostly deals with interlacing muscles, nerves, and blood supply and its effects on its movements and activities like eating, tasting, swallowing, speaking.
Tongue Injuries
Tongue injuries are caused by biting, tearing, and cutting your tongue with sharp objects. If left untreated, tongue injuries will lead to severe infections in your mouth and oral cavity. Tongues also have nerves that go all the way up to the brain. This is why you can feel like you’re tasting something salty when you’re actually sensing an odor like perfume.
- As per statistics, a male tongue measures about 8.3 cm, and a female tongue measures about 7.9 cm. An adult possesses 2,000 to 4,000 taste buds in their tongue.
- Every week, the sensory cells in our taste buds keep changing according to the taste.
- About a fifth of the population is classified as supertasters with greater taste sensitivity, especially for bitter foods.
- Another 1⁄4 of the population is classified as non-tasters, who are not as sensitive as supertasters.
Taste Buds and Tongue
Taste cells may also be found in the rear of your throat. In the mucous membranes of their lips and cheeks, infants and young children are more taste-sensing cells. Every cell gives signals to the brain, which the brain interprets as taste.
We were taught that the tongue had four flavors: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. However, this is not the truth. A fifth flavor is known as savory, which may be detected on every tongue area. The sides of our tongue are more sensitive than the center, and our rear tongue is more sensitive to bitter flavors.
To the naked eye, taste buds aren’t visible. They are found all over the mouth, not just the tongue. Taste buds are unique, and they can be quite sensitive to various tastes. So it’s easy to determine what we ingest, whether it’s poisonous or spoiled foods, so we can quickly spit it out before swallowing. Even though the tongue is made of eight different muscles, it’s not the strongest muscle in the body.
Want to learn more about this? You can visit Pacific Highway Dental in Kent Washington at 27020 Pacific Highway South, Suite C, Kent, WA 98032. Or you can contact our office to book an appointment at 253-529-9434.