The Atlantic

The Unexpectedly Familiar Way People Taste Water

Research suggests that water is sensed by the same taste cells that detect sourness.
Source: Eric Gaillard / Reuters

We don’t think about the taste of water very much, despite the fact that we’d have been dead long ago without a way to sense the substance that makes up 50 to 60 percent of our bodies. There is something, somewhere, in the mouth that tells us we are drinking it. Mouse research has previously indicated that drinking water triggers the firing of nerves that ferry taste information from the have pinpointed a specific set of taste cells in mice that cause these nerves to fire. Surprisingly, they are cells we are already quite familiar with.

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic3 min read
They Rode the Rails, Made Friends, and Fell Out of Love With America
The open road is the great American literary device. Whether the example is Jack Kerouac or Tracy Chapman, the national canon is full of travel tales that observe America’s idiosyncrasies and inequalities, its dark corners and lost wanderers, but ult
The Atlantic8 min readAmerican Government
The Most Consequential Recent First Lady
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The most consequential first lady of modern times was Melania Trump. I know, I know. We are supposed to believe it was Hillary Clinton, with her unbaked cookies
The Atlantic4 min read
Hayao Miyazaki’s Anti-war Fantasia
Once, in a windowless conference room, I got into an argument with a minor Japanese-government official about Hayao Miyazaki. This was in 2017, three years after the director had announced his latest retirement from filmmaking. His final project was

Related Books & Audiobooks