this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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"If you tell a lie big enough and tell it frequently enough, people will eventually come to believe it". What is an example of this happening today? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I would really rather that these were actual examples, and not conspiracy theories. We all have our own unsubstantiated ideas about what shadowy no-gooders are doing, but I'd rather hear about things that are actually happening.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago (5 children)

The Toungue map.

The idea that different parts of the tongue are responsible for feeling different tastes. This blatantly false idea was made up in 1901 out of thin air and then made its way into biology classrooms somehow. It was taught to schoolchildren (including me) for about 100 years as a biological fact, even though every human being in that time proved it false by experiment thousands of times by eating things and tasting them with the "wrong" parts of the tongue. It doesn't quite count as an example of this happening today, because we finally realized that it simply wasn't true and have stopped teaching it, but still: 100 years is a long time to realize that something is false when every human being in the world is confronted with physical evidence several times every day.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't think this is actually a myth. I think there's an extreme version of the statement, but it nevertheless is true that there are specialized taste buds and that they aggregate on sections on the tongue.

And I think there's a whole rabbit hole here, of overeager "corrections", that are not in fact corrections but just someone engaging in bad faith with a statement that's close enough to the actual truth. It's actually more wrong to categorically dismiss it, then it would be to note the difference between it and the truth, which is to say while they are not strictly regions, they're nevertheless as attested to be the NIH:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8956797/

There is undoubtedly a spatial component to our experience of gustatory stimulus qualities such as sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami, however its importance is currently unknown. Taste thresholds have been shown to differ at different locations within the oral cavity where gustatory receptors are found. However, the relationship between the stimulation of particular taste receptors and the subjective spatially-localized experience of taste qualities is uncertain. Although the existence of the so-called ‘tongue map’ has long been discredited, the psychophysical evidence clearly demonstrates significant (albeit small) differences in taste sensitivity across the tongue, soft palate, and pharynx (all sites where taste buds have been documented).

In my opinion, the more interesting phenomenon is understanding how these facts, and the temptation to correct, challenges our ability to sustain nuance and to carefully differentiate between degrees of truth, instead of just making blanket denials.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Getting in to the fine details of it is important for researchers or doctors who specifically work with the tongue, but the issue that we're talking about here is how this was commonly taught as absolute fact to young children with no nuance and seemingly for no reason other than it being widely believed.

If anyone is specifically claiming that the tongue is completely uniform in taste reception then they're it taking too far, sure. But generally when I see this brought up, the focus is on questioning the process of how some facts make it in to what schools teach as "common knowledge" even when they are both wrong and unimportant to daily life and general education.

When a teacher tells a 6-7 year old that flavors can only be tasted on certain parts of your tongue, the problem isn't that they failed to call it a "spatial component to our experience of gustatory stimulus". At that age, teachers have to strip out most nuance from any lesson, and the goal is to find a way to explain things that is true enough while still being understandable to young children.

So why, if stripping out the nuance makes it basically wrong, did teachers keep teaching it for a century? Even if it were true, it's not really important information for most people. Necessarily even, because if it were important to daily life, it would be a lot easier to notice it's mostly wrong.
I don't know, and I don't think there's an exact reason. I had teachers tell us about this, then seem to realize they needed a reason for it to matter and try to turn it in to a lesson about scientific inquiry. They told us to go home and try putting flavors on the 'wrong' parts of the tongue and notice how we couldn't taste anything. I tried it once, and it didn't work, and it was never brought up again.

Feel free to educate people about the mechanics of our sense of taste, but I think this is a fine example of myths making it in to what's taught in schools.

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