Just as a clarification about taste--there are five basic tastes (they fairly recently identified the fifth one, David, within the last few years) They are sweet sour, salty, bitter and what is usually described as "savory" (related to fully tasting meat especially). Everything else that we experience as taste is actually smell and taste combined. Which is why those of us who have some of our taste buds destroyed can benefit, when eating, from inhaling the scent of whatever we're eating as we go--it helps to feel as though we're experiencing taste better since most of us have our sense of smell intact.

And there are indeed different parts of the tongue that have more sensitivity to the 5 different tastes. This is easily demonstrated by having a person (with a normal tongue) dip a q-tip in salt water or lemon juice or somehting sweet and see how strongly the taste comes across on different parts of the tongue (and I know this because I do this demonstration in my Intro. Psych class every semester).

I think I have gotten almost all my sense of taste back although I have a very sensitive tongue and so am quite limited in what I can eat because so many things "burn"(very sugary things, anything with vinegar, anything with orange, pineapple or strawberry juice). Interestingly I can eat things that have a little bite from pepper (black or hot peppers) without any extreme pain. Go figure.

Nelie