When you consider the tongue, what leaps to mind are the five canonical
tastes - sweet, salt, bitter, sour, and umami. These sensations arise
when receptors on the surface of taste bud cells are activated by your
food, triggering nerve fibers that run to your brain and help generate
the experience of a savory roast or a fresh strawberry.
But your tongue is more versatile than that. It's also sensitive to
temperature, pressure, and chemicals that mimic both of these things,
which turn up in a number of foods. This peculiar latter group of
sensations is called
chemesthesis, and you probably experience some flavor of it every day.
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