What Are My Taste Buds?
Your tongue is covered with little bumps that are called “papillae”. Inside each papillae are special cells that form your taste buds. Liquids in your mouth wet the food you eat, and some of the food chemicals come into contact with your taste buds.
They send taste messages to your brain. To your tongue, there are five flavors: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. You taste sweet foods on the tip of your tongue, and sour and salty things on the sides.
In the back of your tongue you taste bitter foods, a popular myth assigns these different tastes to different regions of the tongue; in reality these tastes can be detected by any area of the tongue. On average, the human tongue has 2,000–8,000 taste buds.