Q: Are taste buds really divided into sections on the tongue that sense four different flavors?

A: Trying to navigate the sense of taste with a map of the tongue labeled with regions sensitive to four kinds of flavor would be like trying to drive cross-country with a map that did not show the interstate system.

“Although there are subtle regional differences in sensitivity to different compounds over the lingual surface, the oft-quoted concept of a ‘tongue map’ defining distinct zones for sweet, bitter, salty and sour has largely been discredited,” according to a review article in The Journal of Cell Biology in August 2010.

That map of relative sensitivities, frequently reproduced in textbooks after the researcher Edwin Boring sketched it in 1942, neglected the “fifth taste,” called umami, from the Japanese for rich, meaty protein flavors.

The outdated map also did not reflect later findings that taste buds, clusters of sensitive cells, have different degrees of sensitivity to molecules carrying more than one basic taste and that these clusters are distributed across the entire surface of the tongue.