Are grapes sour? How brain decodes taste

London: Researchers have discovered how taste is encoded in patterns of neural activity in the human brain. The ability to taste is crucial for food choice and the formation of food preferences. Tastants in the mouth activate specific receptors on the tongue corresponding to each of the basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savoury. The signal is then transduced further to the brain. Different tastes evoked different dynamic patterns of electrical activity. A machine learning algorithm could be trained to discriminate between these patterns.