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Take the taste bud test

This activity will take 30 minutes, is for ages 7 to 10 with supervision needed.

Are you brave enough to take the taste bud test?

Do your eyes and nose help you to taste?

Your tongue can detect sweetness or saltiness – but it isn’t the only part of your body that helps you enjoy your food. 

In this activity, you'll discover how important your senses of smell and sight are when you're eating. 

Your tongue, nose and eyes are all sensory organs. This means that they are full of sensitive cells that collect information about the world and send it to your brain. 

What you'll need

  • Colourful, flavoured sweets (e.g. jellybeans, skittles or fruit pastilles)
  • A banana
  • A fork
  • A bowl
  • A towel
  • A spoon for each taste tester
  • An eye mask for each taste tester (you can also use a scarf)
  • Taste testers
  • Pen and paper

Step by step

  • Prepare your taste tests

    Step 1 of 7

    Before your taste testers join you, make sure that nobody is allergic to any of the food you're going to be taste testing. When you're ready, mush up the banana in a bowl.

    A hand using a fork to mash up banana in a bowl

  • Pick your sweet flavours

    Step 2 of 7

    Pick a few sweet flavours that you want to test. Make sure you have enough sweets of the same flavour for each taste tester. 

    A glass jar full of colourful jellybean sweets. 3 sweets are labelled 'Bubblegum', 'Blueberry' and 'Grape'.

  • Hide the taste tests

    Step 3 of 7

    Cover your taste tests with a towel so that your taste testers don't see or smell the food before you begin the experiment.

    A smiling woman with brown hair sits behind a mysterious mound on a table, covered by a white tea towel

  • Banana woosh test

    Step 4 of 7

    Invite your taste testers to sit down, then ask them to close their eyes and pinch their nose. Give them a spoon with a bit of mushed up banana on it and ask them to taste it. After two seconds, tell them to un-pinch their nose. Ask them what they experienced and share any similarities or differences in your senses. They might have sensed a sudden whoosh of banana flavour when they un-pinched their nose.

    A woman who has black hair and is wearing a yellow shirt has her eyes closed, is pinching her nose and is holding a spoon. She is frowning.

  • Sweets taste test – round one

    Step 5 of 7

    Next, ask your taste testers to wear the eye masks. Give each of them the first of the flavoured sweets you have picked and ask them to taste it. Then, ask them to take off their eye-masks and write down what flavour they think the sweet was. Don't let them discuss their thoughts yet – they might influence each other. Repeat this for every sweet flavour.

    A splitscreen image of two women on either side of a wiggly blue line. Both women are wearing eye-masks and chewing. An image of two pink jellybean sweets is overlayed in the middle of the screen.

  • Sweet taste test – round two

    Step 6 of 7

    Repeat the last step without the eye masks.

    A smiling woman wearing a floral top holds up a small whiteboard with 'strawberry' written on it. An image of 2 pink jellybeans is overlayed in the top left corner.

  • Total up the sweet-taste-test points

    Step 7 of 7

    It's time to discuss the results. For every sweet flavour the taste testers guessed correctly across both rounds, give them one point. Are there any differences between round one where they wore eye masks and round two where they didn't? In round two, was it the same, easier or harder to guess the sweet flavour?

    Three women sit behind a table with whiteboards in front of them. They are all laughing and the woman in the middle is clapping.

    What's going on?

    Were you surprised how difficult it was to taste the banana without being able to smell? When you chew your food, lots of smelly molecules flow up your nose. Your brain combines this with information from your tongue to build a taste. This is why food can taste boring if you have a blocked nose.

    Your sense of sight is also important when deciding what flavour you're eating. When you see a particular colour food, such as a bright red strawberry, your brain remembers all the other times it tasted this. You basically decide what you think you are about to taste before you even put it in your mouth.

    Our science

    Scientists here at the Crick have seen what different smells look like in the brain using a special X-ray scanner. It shows tiny structures in your brain that react differently when they sense certain smells, like banana, sweets and especially more powerful smells like vomit.

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