The Perception Of Taste Essay Paper
Taste buds are the sensory receptors for taste, stimulated by food or drink. Taste buds are composed of taste cells, basal cells, and sustentacular cells. Basal cells are located at the bottom of taste cells and differentiate into taste cells. Sustentacular cells are supportive cells. Taste buds are located on the tongue, palate, epiglottis, pharynx, and upper one-third of the esophagus in the walls of the fungiform, vallate, and foliate papillae. The filiform papillae, located on the back of the tongue, does not contain taste buds. Taste is a chemical sense composed of approximately thirteen chemical receptors (Gibbons & Sadiq, 2019)The Perception Of Taste Essay Paper.
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Individuals can detect hundreds of different tastes, but they are clustered into five categories. Sour taste -caused by acids, sweet is elicited by organic compounds such as alcohols, ionized salts elicit salty taste, long-chain nitrogen or alkaloid based organic compounds elicit bitter taste while L – glutamate containing foods elicit sweet or umami taste. The taste receptors have different thresholds, with bitter having the highest for protective functions. Each taste bud responds to only one of the five taste stimuli at low concentrations, but each may respond to more than one (Taruno et al., 2021)The Perception Of Taste Essay Paper.
Microvilli, or taste hairs, cover the receptor cells on the taste buds, serving as the receptor surface. Taste nerve fibers have terminal branches in the taste hairs. Vesicles carrying neurotransmitters are released to stimulate the nerve fiber in response to these fibers’ taste stimulus. The taste pathway is composed of first-order, second-order, and third-order neurons. First-order neurons are located in the seventh, ninth & tenth cranial nerves ganglia. Chorda tympani, a branch of the facial nerve, transmits impulses from taste buds of the anterior two-thirds of the tongue to Geniculate ganglion cell bodies. The glossopharyngeal nerve transmits impulses from taste buds in the posterior one-third of the tongue to the superior and inferior ganglion. The vagus nerve transmits impulses from the palate, pharynx, and epiglottis to the superior and inferior ganglion. Al the ganglia terminate in the Nucleus of Tractus solitarius. The second-order neurons commence from the Nucleus of tractus solitarius, cross the midline into the medial lemniscus, and end in the ventral posterior medial Nucleus of the thalamus. The third-order neurons start from the anteroposterior medial thalamic Nucleus and terminate in the taste cortex located in the post-central gyrus (Gibbons & Sadiq, 2019)The Perception Of Taste Essay Paper. When one takes a candy, the sweet molecules reach the sweet taste buds at the tip of the tongue. This stimulates the taste hairs and G – protein-coupled receptors causing neurotransmitter release. The impulses are transmitted via the Chorda Tympani nerve to the geniculate ganglion, then to the Nucleus of the Tractus solitarius, the medial lemniscus pathway, to terminate in the taste cortex. Here a sweet perception is made.
Physiology of the Sense of Smell
The olfactory area of the nose, which is located high up in the nasal cavity, perceives smell. The site contains millions of olfactory receptor cells. Each olfactory cell’s peripheral process reaches the mucosal surface and expands into a ventricle with numerous cilia. The ventricle serves as a sensory receptor for smelling chemicals. The perquisites for a substance t be smelled: volatility for the substance to be sniffed, some degree of water- solubility to penetrate the nasal mucus membrane, and some level of lipid solubility to permeate the plasma membrane. Olfactory receptors are bipolar neurons that regenerate every 30-45 days. Cilia contains odorant-binding proteins whereby the binding of a chemical stimulant mediates the opening of ion channels via the cyclic AMP G – protein-coupled second messenger system. Olfactory nerves are olfactory cells’ central processes that pass through the cribriform plate of the ethmoid and terminate in the mitral cells of the olfactory bulb. Mitral cell axons create the olfactory tract, which transports smell to the prepyriform cortex and amygdaloid nucleus, where it is perceived. The olfactory system is linked to the autonomic system (López‐Elizalde et al., 2018)The Perception Of Taste Essay Paper.
When we breathe in air with a pungent smell, the odorant-binding protein binds an odorant protein to the receptor activating the G protein. The binding mediates α subunit release by coupling with guanosine triphosphate. Action potentials in the olfactory receptors are achieved by the intracellular rise of cyclic adenosine monophosphate with an influx of cations leading to depolarization. Action potentials are transmitted via synapses from the sensory axons to the olfactory bulb. Encoding takes place in the olfactory bulb. Odorant information is further transmitted to the olfactory cortex and neocortex for refinement. The brain perceives the stimuli as odorant, and the output is that the individual gets out of the room or squeezes their nose.
Physiology of Body Position and Movement
Proprioception or kinesthesia is the sixth sense responsible for sensing body position and body position. Mechanosensory neurons located within muscles, joints, and tendons mediate proprioception. Proprioceptive signals are conveyed to the central nervous system. They are combined with information from visual and vestibular systems to build an overall picture of body movement, position, and acceleration. Sensory feedback from proprioceptors is critical for body posture stabilization and coordination. The muscle spindle fibers contain Type 1a sensory fibers that encode information on limb movement and velocity, whereas type II fibers provide information on static muscle fibers. Golgi tendon organs in the muscle-tendon interface provide information on the load acting on a limb through Type Ib afferents. Pacinian corpuscles and Ruffini endings offer information on specific joint positions. The activation occurs at a certain threshold, mainly at extreme joint positions (Prochazka, 2021)The Perception Of Taste Essay Paper. Activation of a peripheral receptor initiates the proprioception reflex arc. The afferent stimuli include information from the inner ear regarding orientation and motion and the integumentary stretch receptors. Impulses from peripheral proprioceptors are transmitted to the brain via the conscious or the unconscious pathway.
The sense of equilibrium mediated by the vestibular system informs one of the positions of their body in relation to space. The vestibular organs are fluid-filled and contain hair cells that respond to gravitational forces, rotational and linear movement. On stimulation of the hair cells, the vestibular nerve sends impulses to the brain. Aging, viral infection, and head injury affect the functioning of the vestibular system (Casale et al., 2018). The Achilles reflex arc is a proprioception example. Receptor: Stretching caused by tapping the Achilles tendon stimulates the reflex. The stimulus is carried to the spinal cord by Ia afferent neurons. The Ia afferent neurons relay the stimulus to the cell bodies of the afferent neurons in the dorsal root ganglion. Synapsis of the afferent nerve roots occurs, followed by activating alpha motor neurons in the spinal cord’s ventral horn. The alpha motor neuron transmits efferent stimulus to the neuromuscular junction of the triceps surae causing reflex muscular contraction.
Contribution of Gestalt psychologists To The Understanding of The Brain’s organization of Sensations into Perspectives
In psychology, gestalt perspectives refer to examining ambiguous stimuli to see where and how the brain addresses these ambiguities. They also try to comprehend sensory and perception as processing groups or wholes of information rather than forming wholes from numerous little bits. The figure-ground relationship is the first Gestalt principle. The principle states that human beings tend to divide their visual environment into figures and ground-based on this idea. The figure represents the person or object in the field of vision, whereas the background is the ground. Our perception can vary substantially based on what is regarded as a figure and ground. The assumption is that, is assumed that our capacity to understand sensory information is dependent on what we label as a figure and what we identify as the ground in every given circumstance The Perception Of Taste Essay Paper.
Secondly, the Gestalt principle of proximity explains how sensory data is organized into meaningful perception. According to this theory, entities that are close together tend to be grouped. The way we read is an example of how the proximity principle works. In a sentence lacking subject-verb agreement, proper punctuation, or spacing between the letters, we perceive the words based on what they closely resemble. “Cany ouu nders tandt hiss Tatem ent?” for example. The statement has spacing errors, but one can easily derive meaning based on what the words resemble. The principle goes hand in hand with the principle of similarity. According to this principle, items that look alike are placed together. For example, we can differentiate individuals of different races based on phenotypical characteristics such as the complexion, face, and hair texture.
The law of good continuation or continuity and the law of closure is the final two Gestalt principles. According to the law of continuity, we are more inclined to see continuous, smooth flowing lines than jagged, dotted lines. When elements are arranged in a line or curve, they appear to be more connected to one another than when they are set randomly. According to the law of closure, we organize our senses into entire objects rather than a collection of parts. For example, when a person sees a shape drawn in dotted lines, there are likely to perceive it as whole rather than broken. Similarly, our brains frequently overlook contradicting information while filling in blanks.
Visualization of The World in Three Dimensions
The fact that our two eyes gaze forward dominates many facets of our visual experience. Although the eyes’ location makes the world behind our head inaccessible to vision, direct three-dimensional vision of the scenes in front of us is achievable through coordinated use of the eyes. Each eye creates a two-dimensional image of things. On the other hand, the brain combines two-dimensional images and interprets the differences to produce three-dimensional vision. This is termed stereoscopic vision. An in-depth feeling of sight is formed in this visual experience from distinct viewpoints of information obtained by the horizontal separation of two eyes. It is called the binocular disparity in animals, while it is called the retinal disparity in humans. Retinal disparity uses vergence and parallax motion (Ye et al., 2021)The Perception Of Taste Essay Paper.
In this procedure, the brain complements the acquired matches first, then calculates the difference between the two images. Even if there is a minimal difference, the final image can be trusted with in-depth perception. The explanation for this is that each human eye sees 2D images separately, providing information on height and length. On the other hand, Foreshortening can be used to guess information about the objects’ third dimension, width. Because of the perspective, an object’s height and length can be shortened throughout this process (Gao et al., 2020). While perceiving, the brain gives constant and instantaneous information regarding the width. Stereopsis causes the two eyeballs to focus on the same object, causing them to converge. Consequently, the extraocular muscle spindles are stretched by convergence—kinesthetic sensations from these extraocular muscles, like the monocular accommodation cue, aid distance and depth perception.
Whereas binocular cues are based on receiving sensory information in three dimensions from both eyes, monocular cues are observed with one eye, and the information is represented in two dimensions. Monocular cues include relative size, occlusion, texture gradient, contrast differences, linear perspective, and motion parallax. In motion parallax, the apparent relative motion of numerous stationary objects against a background conveys clues about their relative distance as an observer travels. Motion parallax can provide absolute depth information if the direction and velocity of movement are known (Mehringer et al., 2022)The Perception Of Taste Essay Paper.
References
Casale, J., Browne, T., Murray, I., & Gupta, G. (2018). Physiology, vestibular system. https://europepmc.org/books/nbk532978
Gao, Z., Zhai, G., Deng, H., & Yang, X. (2020). Extended geometric models for stereoscopic 3D with vertical screen disparity. Displays, 65, 101972. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.displa.2020.101972
Gibbons, J. R., & Sadiq, N. M. (2019). Neuroanatomy, neural taste pathway. https://europepmc.org/article/nbk/nbk545236
López‐Elizalde, R., Campero, A., Sánchez‐Delgadillo, T., Lemus‐Rodríguez, Y., López‐González, M. I., & Godínez‐Rubí, M. (2018). Anatomy of the olfactory nerve: A comprehensive review with cadaveric dissection. Clinical Anatomy, 31(1), 109-117. https://doi.org/10.1002/ca.23003
Mehringer, W., Wirth, M., Roth, D., Michelson, G., & Eskofier, B. M. (2022). Stereopsis Only: Validation of a Monocular Depth Cues Reduced Gamified Virtual Reality with Reaction Time Measurement. IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics, (01), 1-1. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel-
Prochazka, A. (2021). Proprioception: clinical relevance and neurophysiology. Current Opinion in Physiology, 23, 100440. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cophys.2021.05.003
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Taruno, A., Nomura, K., Kusakizako, T., Ma, Z., Nureki, O., & Foskett, J. K. (2021). Taste transduction and channel synapses in taste buds. Pflügers Archiv-European Journal of Physiology, 473(1), 3-13. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00424-020-02464-4
Ye, Z., Xue, C., & Lin, Y. (2021, February). Visual perception based on gestalt theory. In International Conference on Intelligent Human Systems Integration (pp. 792-797). Springer, Cham. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-68017-6_118 The Perception Of Taste Essay Paper
