hearts like tongues

[fflo]

That's a taste bud.

Contrary to the old textbook diagrams you may recall, it seems each taste bud is capable of registering/transmitting all of the 5 taste sensations. But there are only 5 of those. I thought there were 4, but there's something called "umami" (Wikipedia says it's sometimes called "savory"). It's got something to do with the responding to salts (such as MSG) of glutamic acid, a type of amino acid. Our tongues may or may not be like those of rats with this one (it looks like we don't know), but the brain and synapses and stuff like that there are involved. G-protein-coupled receptors, as with 2 of the other tastes---bitter and sweet---come into play with umami. Then there are also salty and sour.

Anyhoo, discounting what smell may add, all the complicated taste sensations we experience are (still thought to be) made up of just those 5 fundamentals.

If one were to posit that there are just a handful of fundamental emotions that work the same way, what do you think they are? The one that got me to thinking of this notion was the feeling of mourning.

Comments

радост

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

i do like it myself. i do occasionally use it in serbian for some unqualified happiness i see in people, which is of course rare. but you do know it when you see it, when something just does make somebody happy.

there's a whole range in english that i don't understand (like "frustrated'--not much sense to me, or "excited"--i virtually never say it because i don't know what it means, except when i'm faking americanness because i know the word means something to the other person). there are some in serbian that i don't go for either, like when people tell me they are pissed off (or something to that effect), which turns out to be their general state of mind, or that they are "glad," which doesn't end up meaning anything.

i would say "angry" is a kind of "sad;" "love" is a kind of "happy;" "fear" feels pretty steady on its own, i had forgotten about it.

Re: радост

[fflo.livejournal.com]

"mourning" is a special kind of "sad," i'm sure. i guess i'm wanting to call a sadness at loss a certain/distinct feeling. primal, fundamental. it has its own versions: howling, aching ones, quiet bereft ones. and i refuse to call them stages of acceptance, like some hopscotch game through which you get the hell over it already. even if they may be.

i think "excited" gets an awful lot of play here, applied to such variations it loses meaning without clear context. "frustrated" i've got my gut sense about. but it, too, depends on context. i don't think you can be sort of generally frustrated. maybe you have multiple contexts of frustration going on, adding up to a very broadly frustrated person. i don't know.

speaking of context, i do notice that those are both adjectives that are sometimes preceded by "sexually," whereas i think it is quite uncommon for someone to refer to being "sexually sad," for instance. though i could claim to have been so, i guess.

well. gotta get back to work.