Processing of Sweet, Astringent and Pungent Oral Stimuli in the Human Brain

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.

Keywords: astringency; capsaicin; fMRI; gustation; tannin; taste.