I recently got a shock from a faulty outlet, and for a while past then, along with other sensations, I've had of all things a weirdly sour taste on the tip of my tongue that's been fading slowly.
Of course I became paranoid and had to look up if I'd just destroyed the nerves in my tongue or something, but then I found this article from 2015:
Faking Taste With Electrical Shocks to the Tongue Is Our Dystopian Food Future
Our taste receptors function in part via ion channels, which communicate directly with the brain—and these channels can be short-circuited via electricity.
A sour taste, for example, can be induced by a current of 180 microamps to an 80 percent degree of accuracy, according to Ranasinghe.
Other tastes are more difficult.
"The same ion channel is responsible for identifying bitter and sweet sensations on the tongue," he said. Thus, they're harder to differentiate, and the Taste+ system can only simulate them with a 50 to 60 percent degree of accuracy.
Dr. Nimesha Ranasinghe, a research fellow at NUS, has invented Taste+, a range of spoons and water bottles with embedded electrical diodes that hit your tongue at the same time as whatever you're eating or drinking does. Electrical charges change the flavor you experience to bitter or sweet, salty or sour, depending on their frequency and amplitude. "If you want to simulate taste, there are two places we can tap into. First the tongue, then the brain," Ranasinghe said in a Skype conversation. "The brain can be tricky, so we focused on stimulating the tongue." The device is sort of like an Oculus Rift for your mouth.
Shocking the tongue to get flavors, I could see this replacing bulimia.
Ę̵̚x̸͎̾i̴͚̽s̵̻͐t̷͐ͅe̷̯͠n̴̤̚t̵̻̅i̵͉̿a̴̮͊l̵͍̂ ̴̹̕D̵̤̀e̸͓͂t̵̢͂e̴͕̓c̸̗̄t̴̗̿ï̶̪v̷̲̍é̵͔
