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　　Back in ancient times, philosophers like Aristotle werealready speculating about the origins of taste, andhow the tongue sensed elemental tastes like sweet,bitter, salty and sour.

　　"What we discovered just a few years ago is thatthere are regions of the brain, regions of the cortex,where particular fields of neurons represent these different tastes again, so there's a sweetfield, a bitter field, a salty field, etcetera."

　　Nick Ryba, a sensory neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health

　　Ryba and his colleagues found that you can actually taste without a tongue at all, simply bystimulating the "taste" part of the brain—the insular cortex.

　　They ran the experiment in mice with a special sort of brain implant—a fiber-optic cable thatturns neurons on with a pulse of laser light.

　　And by switching on the "bitter" sensing part of the brain, they were able to make mice puckerup, as if they were tasting something bitter—even though absolutely nothing bitter wastouching the tongues of the mice.

　　In another experiment, the researchers fed the mice a bitter flavoring on their tongues—butthen made it more palatable by switching on the "sweet" zone of the brain.

　　"What we were doing here was adding the sweetness, but only adding it in the brain, not inwhat we were giving to the mouse."

　　Think adding sugar to your coffee—but doing it only in your mind.

　　The results appear in the journal Nature.

　　Ryba says the study suggests that a lot of our basic judgments about taste—sweet meansgood, bitter means bad—are actually hard-wired at the level of the brain.

　　As for that virtual-sugar-in-your-coffee idea?

　　I think it's basically science fiction to think that this would be something that would be appliedto humans."

　　But today’s science fiction might be tomorrow’s artificial sweetener.