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Published on: June 29, 2017
Processing of Sweet, Astringent and Pungent Oral Stimuli in the Human Brain
Yunmeng Zhu1, Divesh Thaploo1, Pengfei Han2
1Smell & Taste Clinic, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Abstract:
Taste and oral somatosensation are intimately related to each other from peripheral receptors to the central nervous system. Oral astringent sensation is thought to contain both gustatory and somatosensory components. In the present study, we compared the cerebral response to an astringent stimulus (tannin), with the response to one typical taste stimulus (sweet - sucrose) and one typical somatosensory stimulus (pungent - capsaicin) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of 24 healthy subjects. Three distributed brain sub-regions responded significantly different to the three types of oral stimulations: lobule IX of the cerebellar hemisphere, right dorsolateral superior frontal gyrus, and left middle temporal gyrus. This suggests that these regions play a major role in the discrimination of astringency, taste, and pungency.
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