It has been said that the tongue can taste only 5 flavors: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and savory. Without smelling, this is all we could taste. For example, I read about a teacher doing a test with different flavored suckers. She blindfolded her students and told them to taste each sucker and state which flavor of sucker they had tasted.
The results were that the students could not tell what flavor they had- they all tasted sweet. My class wanted to try this. We decided to do this with Jelly beans, instead of suckers. The results were that the students could not really taste the different flavors like the previous experiment had stated. Additionally, boys were more correct than the girls.
The class came up with the idea that maybe the boys either cheated, or, they had a bigger passage connecting the mouth and nasal passage. When the boys swallow, some of the scent would escape up to the olfactory nerves, allowing the boys to know what flavor the jelly bean was. We really aren't sure but this is a good theory. Attatched are some pictures from the activity.
What a great blog! I love the student pictures and the description of what is going on in the science lab. What a fun way to capture the learning. Fantastic job...
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