Body Parts

Some things I've been thinking about this month.

The Tongue Map

Does anyone else remember learning ‘the tongue map’ in school? The tongue map divides the tongue into zones according to the basic tastes—salty, sweet, sour, or bitter—they can detect. According to this model, the tongue can only detect one of these tastes in the zone with the corresponding taste buds.

Remember this?

I remember trying this out as a child—moving sour candy around on my tongue to see if I noticed a difference in my perception of the taste. It never worked for me, but I lacked the confidence to translate my observations into true skepticism; I always assumed that I was somehow “doing it wrong.” It was mildly vindicating for me, then, when a friend mentioned that the tongue map has largely been debunked. 

Other people have recounted how the tongue map misconception came to be; I’m only going to paraphrase them here. In 1901 German psychologist David Pauli Hänig published his research on taste perception. He found that different areas of the tongue had different thresholds of perception of certain flavors. How different? We’ll come back to that. He plotted his results like this:

In 1942, Harvard psychologist Edwin G. Boring included an English version of this graph in his textbook on sensation. Here’s that graph:

The problem with these graphs is that they’re highly misleading. You might assume from looking at them that the areas of minimum sensitivity are areas with no sensitivity, and in fact a lot of people did assume this. The first tongue maps were published soon afterwards, and as food scientist Linda Bartoshuk suggested in 1993, Boring’s textbook was probably responsible:

Boring's graph led other authors to conclude that there was virtually no sensation at the loci where the curves showed a minimum sensation and that there was maximum sensation where the curves showed a maximum and so we have the familiar tongue maps labelled ‘sweet’ on the tip of the tongue, ‘bitter’ on the base of the tongue, etc.

In fact there are numerous problems with the tongue map.

For one thing, the idea that there are only four ‘basic tastes’ is wrong. Umami was omitted from the tongue map I learned in school, probably because neither Hänig nor Boring included umami in their research. There also may be more than five tastes.

(Speaking of taste, an interesting fact I learned while reading about taste that isn’t relevant to the tongue map: although as far as we know, we only consciously ‘taste’ within the oral cavity, taste receptors are actually expressed in cells throughout the gastrointestinal tract, where they possibly help regulate digestion.)

For another, the relative differences in sensitivity such as Hänig and Boring plotted are real but not as significant as the tongue map suggests. How significant these spatial differences are is still a topic of some debate. However, the taste buds are not segregated like the tongue map suggests; they are distributed across the front, sides, and back of the tongue. The idea that you simply cannot detect, for example, bitterness outside of a ‘bitter zone’ is false.

Research casting serious doubt on the tongue map dates back to at least the 1970s. I learned the tongue map in school at least twenty years later. And I want to know, why? As Esther Inglis-Arkell wrote for Gizmodo in 2012,

We all have tongues, don't we? We've all tasted things. What teachers were telling us conflicted directly with all our experience. It had to have conflicted with their own experience. Why did it keep getting told?

I wonder the same thing. It’s not just that change should have come sooner in the form of updated textbooks and curricula, that is to say, top-down. It’s that I’m surprised change didn’t come sooner from the bottom up. This is a model that can be disproved at home with one’s own body parts. In fact, the tongue map was actually a popular hands-on learning activity. As Bartoshuk wrote in 1993 (several years before I learned the tongue map in school), “The popularity of this laboratory demonstration is particularly amazing considering that it must fail to produce the expected results quite regularly.”

When I learned that the map was a misconception, I went down a Reddit rabbit hole and found tons of stories like this:

And I want to know, are there any stories of teachers taking their charges seriously when it didn’t work for them? Of actually using the scientific method the learning activity was supposed to teach?

Or did this learning activity actually teach us something quite different? It’s not hard to imagine that what many people learned was that the dictates of Science, textbooks, and teachers contradict their own senses and reason. Science is a practice, a method of engaging with the world and establishing fact. It’s not an ideology. But when you’re forced to accept and write up results that aren’t actually borne out by the data, you’re learning that science is an ideology. Or perhaps you’re learning that the practice of doing science isn’t accessible to you—like when I resolved the cognitive dissonance of getting the ‘wrong’ result by assuming that I was the problem.

Look, as myths go, the tongue map is a pretty harmless one, but its persistence in the curriculum doesn’t inspire confidence. Think about the last few years—I wouldn’t exactly say we have no problem with scientific literacy in this country. It’s worse than that; people aren’t just having trouble understanding science, they’re having trouble trusting science. And I wonder if the tongue map doesn’t have something to teach us about that.

Buccal Fat

If you’re like me, you had never heard the term “buccal fat” until a few months ago. But it’s been all over social media recently, particularly after Agnes Philip, a Florida computer science student in her twenties, posted pictures of celebrities she speculated had undergone the procedure, tweeting “Wake up babe new surgery just dropped.” (I wish I could embed the tweet here, but it’s since been deleted.)  

Buccal fat is basically cheek fat. It’s different, though, from the more superficial subcutaneous fat that can fluctuate with a person’s weight. It’s deeper tissue, padding the face muscles, and it doesn’t really respond to weight loss, which means that if people want to remove some or all of it, they have to do so surgically. The result of buccal fat removal is a more contoured face—or what Maya Allen writing for The Cut called a “snatched jawline.” 

Where in the world is the buccal fat pad? (source)

The surgery isn’t new, but as a plastic surgeon said in The New York Times, “I’m doing three times as many buccal fat reductions this year than I was five years ago.” Judging from social media and Google Trends, interest in the surgery has soared in the last few months.

I’ve been thinking about this trend of buccal fat removal in the context of Jia Tolentino’s brilliant essay, “The Age of Instagram Face,” in which she writes of “the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face.”

It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella. The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic—it suggests a National Geographic composite illustrating what Americans will look like in 2050, if every American of the future were to be a direct descendant of Kim Kardashian West, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner (who looks exactly like Emily Ratajkowski). “It’s like a sexy . . . baby . . . tiger,” Cara Craig, a high-end New York colorist, observed to me recently. The celebrity makeup artist Colby Smith told me, “It’s Instagram Face, duh. It’s like an unrealistic sculpture. Volume on volume. A face that looks like it’s made out of clay.”

In her essay, Tolentino writes specifically about injectables, which are typically less expensive than plastic surgery. Buccal fat removal now appears to be the next evolution. Tolentino was writing in 2019, and I can’t help but think that the pandemic is partially responsible for intensifying the phenomenon. We’re not only dealing with Instagram Face anymore but Zoom face, as for the past few years many of us have been staring at our own faces for hours on end. I can’t help but think that this new fixation on buccal fat—something most easily observed at the angle at which we look at our own faces on Zoom—is the result of all that extra time on Zoom. As UCLA Health reports, “We’re looking at our own faces more than ever before. One study found that spending just one minute looking at our own face in the mirror in low light can cause our perceptions to become distorted.”

The idea that technology can change our perceptions of ourselves is an idea that has been explored for earlier technologies, too. Jennifer Egan does this in one of my favorite books, the underrated Look at Me. In it, the erratic professor Moose is obsessed with the idea that the proliferation of glass windows and mirrors in medieval times led to a new kind of self-obsession that severed images from their meaning.

It transfixed Moose to imagine those early years of quickening sight made possible by the proliferation of clear glass (perfected in Murano, circa 1300)—mirrors, spectacles, windows—light everywhere so suddenly, showing up the dirt and dust and crud that had gone unremarked for centuries. But surely the most shocking revelation had been people’s own physicality, their outward selves blinking strangely back at them from mirrors—this is what I look like; this is what other people see when they look at me—Lacan’s mirror phase wrought large upon whole villages, whole cultures! And yet, as was the case with nearly every phenomenon Moose observed (his own life foremost), a second transformation followed the first and reversed nearly all of its gains, for now the world’s blindness exceeded that of medieval times before clear glass, except that the present blindness came from too much sight, appearances disjointed from anything real, afloat upon nothing, in the service of nothing, cut off from every source of blood and life.

(Look at Me is really a must read for anyone interested in media, image, and identity. It’s the story of a model who has undergone reconstructive surgery after a traumatic car accident and is trying to rebuild her brand after the most crucial part of it, her face, has become unrecognizable.) 

With the advent of new technology comes self-obsession but also, paradoxically, dissociation. A face, at the same time as it becomes synonymous with one’s self (and one’s “brand”), also becomes severed from one’s self, reduced to features that must be tweaked, or perhaps more accurately, “optimized.” “The ideal woman is always optimizing,” Tolentino writes. Raquel S. Benedict memorably posits that the reduction of our selves into ‘features’ that must be optimized is depressing and shallow the same way that McMansions are depressing and shallow:

“The inside of McMansions are designed in order to cram the most ‘features’ inside for the lowest costs.” These features exist to increase the house’s resale value, not to make it a good place to live. No thought is given to the labor needed to clean and maintain these spaces. The master bathroom includes intricate stone surfaces that can only be scrubbed with a toothbrush; the cathedral ceilings in the living room raise the heating and cooling costs to an exorbitant sum; the chandelier in the grand entryway dangles so high that no one can replace the bulbs in it, even with a stepladder.

The same fate has befallen our bodies. A body is no longer a holistic system. It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living. It is not a home to live in and be happy. It, too, is a collection of features: six pack, thigh gap, cum gutters. And these features exist not to make our lives more comfortable, but to increase the value of our assets. Our bodies are investments, which must always be optimized to bring us… what, exactly? Some vague sense of better living? Is a life without bread objectively better than a life with it? When we were children, did we dream of counting every calorie and logging every step?

What I find so depressing about the addition of a “snatched jawline” to the list of ideal facial features is that now buccal fat is another part of our bodies we, particularly women, have to be insecure about. Each time technology creates a new way to be more beautiful it also creates a new way to be ugly. And I wonder, which new features will we be expected to boast in the future? Which body parts will we suddenly be expected to improve, to optimize, to hate?