Dr. Charles Zuker

And in a way that still can be used to ask every one of these problems that the brain has to ultimately compute, encode, and decode.

And what was remarkable about the taste system at the time that I began working on this is that nothing was known about the molecular basis of taste.

You know, we knew that we could taste what has been usually defined as the five basic taste qualities, sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami.

Umami is a Japanese word that means yummy, delicious.

And that's nearly every animal species, the taste of amino acids.

And in humans, it's mostly associated with the taste of MSG, monosodium glutamate, one amino acid in particular.

And so the beautiful thing of the system is that the lines of input are limited to five.

And each of them has a predetermined meaning.

You're born with that specific valence value for each taste of sweet,

Umami and low salt are attractive taste qualities.

They evoke appetitive responses.

I want to consume them.

And bitter and sour are innately predetermined to be aversive.

In the case of bitter, it's very easy to actually look at, see them happening in animals because the first thing you do is you stop licking.

Then you put unhappy face.

Then you squint your eyes and then you start gagging.

And that entire thing happens by the activation of a bitter molecule in a bitter sensing cell in your tongue.

It's incredible.

It's, again, the magic of the brain, you know, how it's able to encode and decode these extraordinary actions and behaviors in response of nothing but a simple, very, you know, unique sensory stimuli.

This palette of five basic tastes...