10 Thing s You Probably Didn't know About Your Tongue

Human tongue is the most ignored organ, of course except special times. However, it is one of the most interesting organs in our body. We cannot live without brain, heart or lungs but we can live without our tongue. However, that does not mean that we don’t need it. This particular organ is important because it helps us to taste our food! There are other important functions of tongue as well.

• It comes in different shapes and can have a variable number of taste buds, the human tongue imprint is as variable as thumb imprints
• Our tongue has a very unique property. It is incapable of detecting taste if it is dry. This means that if you place a piece of lemon on a dry tongue, you will not be able to tell that it is sour. The tongue gets its ability to sense taste only in the presence of saliva that keeps it moist.
• Contrary to popular belief, tests on identical twins have proven that the ability to roll one's tongue into a tube is not a genetic trait
• Tongue cleaning with a tongue scrapper is proven to help prevent heart attack
• Tongue is not the only place where taste buds live. Taste buds can also be found on the inside of our cheeks, on lips, on the roof of our mouth and even under the tongue.
• You don't sense different tastes in different areas of the tongue.
  Despite those tongue maps you’ve likely seen, you can taste sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami relatively equally across the tongue. Test: Put some salt on the tip of your tongue, the supposed home to only sweetness taste receptors.
• It's not really the strongest muscle in your body, either. The tongue is not only incredibly flexible, it also helps us perform some of our favorite activities, like talking and eating -- and it never gets “tired”. As impressive and, weird as it may be, the tongue just doesn’t cut it when it comes to strength: It doesn’t produce the most pressure (that'd be the jaw muscle) or the most force (the quads and the glutes) or the most work overall . It’s actually a mashup of eight different muscles.
• Its color can give your doctor hints about your health.A healthy tongue is a nice pink shade -- except for right after it has devoured blue ice cream or purple candy. Some allergies and infections might cause some redness and swelling of the tongue called glossitis. A bright-red color accompanied by fever and sore throat may be more serious.
• It is the only muscle in human body that works without any support from the skeleton? Yes! It is known as muscular hydrostat.
• Every taste bud on our tongue has somewhere between 50 and 100 taste sensing cells. No individual cell is capable of tasting more than one taste.

Sources: factslengend.org

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