image by: leyre del rio on Unsplash

HWN Suggests

6 Things You Never Knew About Your Tongue

Without our tongues, life would be quite a hassle. We wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation with each other… We wouldn’t be able to eat or swallow properly… But worst of all, we wouldn’t be able to taste our food. The thought alone is enough to make you shiver! But luckily, these lingual masterpieces of biology are right where they’re supposed to be. And as it turns out, there’s a whole lot more to them than their primary functions.

read full article

Featured

  Untangling the Tongue - The Tongue at Rest and Resting in Action

This tongue is also a complex structure of structures with many paired and connected muscles creating its body and securing it to other structures such as the jaw, skull, spine, hyoid bone and sternum. Understanding experientially and untangling these criss-cross connections is key to gaining maximal flexibility, mobility, coordination and integration in our system overall, but especially for easy and free speech and singing.

  What Does A Healthy Tongue Look Like?

The human tongue is an amazing thing. It has thousands of invisible taste buds that make food a pleasure, it allows you to communicate with your fellow humans, and if you’re lucky, it gives you the opportunity to passionately kiss a romantic partner. It can also teach you things about your health, including particular infections, diseases, and deficiencies you may have. That’s why it’s good to understand what a healthy tongue looks like...

 Tales of the Tongue

A small but growing group of researchers is fascinated by an organ we often take for granted. We rarely think about how agile our own tongue needs to be to form words or avoid being bitten while helping us taste and swallow food. But that’s just the start of the tongue’s versatility across the animal kingdom

 The Oddest of Organs: A Brief History of the Tongue

Kate Crowcroft: “The tongue is employed as a metaphor for the extension and consumption of aeons.”

 Your Oral Health is Tied - To Your Tongue!

While the tongue is strong without any bones to support it, it’s not going to outperform your bicep curls. However, it does have an edge when it comes to revealing what’s going on inside of your body.

Articles of Interest

Anatomy and Physiology: The Terrific Tongue

Here’s something fun you can tell people at parties: the tongue isn’t a single muscle—it’s a muscular hydrostat. What’s a muscular hydrostat, you ask? Essentially, it’s a strong, flexible biological structure that contains a whole bunch of muscle fibers but no skeletal structure. If you need a non-tongue example, think elephant trunks and octopus tentacles. Octopuses, slugs, and the roundworm C. elegans also have muscular hydrostat bodies. Cool, right?

Evolution of the human tongue and emergence of speech biomechanics

The human tongue possesses four major extrinsic and four intrinsic muscles. The extrinsic muscles (originating outside of the organ itself) are: the genioglossus, responsible for forward and downward movement of the tongue (anterior) and forward movement of the dorsal tongue body extending into the pharynx (posterior); the styloglossi, which retract the tongue; the hyoglossus, which depresses and retracts the tongue; and the palatoglossus, which elevates the posterior position of the tongue; and the four intrinsic muscles (attaching only to other muscles in the tongue body) are the superior longitudinal and inferior longitudinal and transverse and vertical muscles.

Fact or Fiction?: The Tongue Is the Strongest Muscle in the Body

Is this agile appendage as brawny as people believe?

How Clicking Tongues Get Their Power

Humans can create a huge and subtle range of sounds by forming and crushing air cavities in our mouths.

How Much Do We Really Know About Your Tongue?

Though the human tongue is one of our most important structures, write the authors of a new paper, it’s also one of the least understood. To dispel some of the mystery, their study models where each muscle in the tongue is positioned and also indicates those muscles’ association with the jaw.

How your tongue tells your brain what you’re tasting

Taste buds are complex little growths, too. Each one contains a collection of between 50 and 150 taste receptors and supporting cells, all nested together like cloves in a bulb of garlic. While each person’s taste bud count varies, humans tend to have between 2,000 and 5,000.

Humans' Hidden Ability to Navigate the World With Tongue Clicks

Researchers are discovering just how easily both blind and sighted people can be trained to echolocate.

I Have A Black Spot On My Tongue – Should I Be Worried?

Black spot might not indicate trouble, but if the tongue becomes hairy, that is when it should be paid attention to. It is filled with papillae and are not noticeable, but when the dead cells pile on, they become visible. These papillae easily attract stains from your food, giving them a black hairy look. It is not fully known why the natural shedding process stops.

Is the Tongue the Strongest Muscle in the Human Body?

If you were a staunch proponent of the “tongue is the strongest muscle” myth, you would be surprised to know that the human tongue is not even a muscle in the first place. It is, in fact, a group of eight muscles that control the tongue for specific functions.

Parts of the Human Tongue

The tongue is a muscular organ that can be elongated, rolled, bent, and twisted. It is made of more than 10,000 taste buds that are capable for identifying all 5 different tastes: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami.

Physiology of the tongue with emphasis on taste transduction

The tongue is a complex multifunctional organ that interacts and senses both interoceptively and exteroceptively. Although it is easily visible to almost all of us, it is relatively understudied and what is in the literature is often contradictory or is not comprehensively reported. The tongue is both a motor and a sensory organ: motor in that it is required for speech and mastication, and sensory in that it receives information to be relayed to the central nervous system pertaining to the safety and quality of the contents of the oral cavity.

Say Ah! 3 Weird Things Your Tongue May Tell You About Your Health

When's the last time you looked at your tongue in the mirror? Researchers say there are some fascinating things you might be able to learn from by sticking your tongue out for a look.

Speaking of tongues

Nicholas Ostler's survey of the world's linguistic histories, Empires of the Word, fascinates Martin Jacques

The history of the tongue piercing

Tongue piercings do not have as traditional of a history as other piercings do, some of which can be traced back for millennia in some cultures. One of the first tongue piercings ever performed was on our very own friend and colleague, Elayne Angel. It was executed by body piercing innovator and pioneer, Jim Ward in Los angeles back in the 1980's.

The Power of the Tongue

I have a big problem! I’ve been diagnosed with an incurable disease. It’s a hopeless case—there’s no cure! It is a common enough disease; I would have thought by now that the power of modern science would have found a remedy. But, alas, there is no hope for me. Or is there? My disease? It’s called foot-in-mouth disease. I often say things I shouldn’t, causing much distress for those around me. My incurable problem is that I struggle (like many others) with managing my tongue.

The Taste Map of the Tongue You Learned in School Is All Wrong

Modern biology shows that taste receptors aren’t nearly as simple as that cordoned-off model would lead you to believe.

The tongue: how one of the body’s most sensitive organs is helping blind people ‘see’

With a few tweaks, this technology may eventually become a more reliable instrument to help blind or deaf or blind people navigate. It may even help paraplegic people, unable to use their hands, navigate or communicate more efficiently.

Tongue as a first-line immune organ?

The tongue is an organ strategically situated at the beginning of the gastrointestinal (GI) system, yet it has been remarkably understudied. Not only there is no separate subspecialty dedicated to the tongue, it is even excluded from 27 human organs/tissues thoroughly archived in the NCBI gene expression database. Almost none of my physician colleagues in Western medicine have paid attention to it, except a few who study tongue cancer.

We finally know how your tongue tells your brain what you’re tasting

They used to keep you alive, but now they just give you a sweet tooth.

What your tongue can tell you about your health (including iron deficiency and herpes)

Like pooing and weeing, it's one of those bodily limbs and functions that we never take too much notice of, until someone asks if you can make a 'clover', of course.

Why Can’t Some People Curl Their Tongues?

Tongue-rolling could be akin to ear-wiggling. Few people can do this; it’s not a simple genetic trait either. For other animals, it’s useful to control the ears so they can hear sounds better.

Why Taste Buds Dull As We Age

A taste bud is good at regenerating; its cells replace themselves every 1-2 weeks. This penchant for regeneration is why one recovers the ability to taste only a few days after burning the tongue on a hot beverage, according to Parnes. Aging may change that ability.

Your Tongue Is Probably Filthy, Here’s How to Clean It

Halitosis-causing bacteria might be throwing a rager in there.

Resources

6 Things Your Tongue Tells You

There’s no need to wait until you’re in a dentist’s chair to open wide. Regularly inspecting your tongue in a mirror can help you detect issues in your mouth—and other parts of your body—before they become more serious. Stick it out and give yourself a quick health check.