5 articles
Flavor
Flavor is the multisensory experience of eating, combining taste, retronasal smell, and trigeminal somatosensation, shaped by visual and sound cues; most people mistake it for taste alone and never notice the olfactory component.
Mirror-touch synesthesia
Mirror-touch synesthesia is a synesthesia variant in which seeing another person touched produces a felt touch on one's own body; prevalence about 1.6%, explained by threshold and self-other theories, and linked variably to empathy.
Sweetness
Sweetness: a basic taste quality detected by the T1R2/T1R3 receptor, innate in human infants, lost in obligate carnivores like cats; sugars and non-sugar sweeteners differ in temporal profile and health evidence.
Tickling
Tickling: touching the body to provoke laughter or squirming, divided into knismesis (light, feather-like) and gargalesis (heavy, laughter-inducing); self-tickle is suppressed by cerebellar prediction, and rats and great apes are ticklish too.
Two-point discrimination
Two-point discrimination (2PD), from Weber's 1834 method, measures the minimum skin separation at which two blunt contacts feel distinct; thresholds range from 1–2 mm at the tongue tip to 20–30 mm on the hand back, but nonspatial cues inflate performance, prompting the two-point orientation discrimination alternative.