Also known as the wet or the “mui”, the tongue is a multipurpose and versatile organ that we use to taste, swallow, speak, breathe … And of course, to kiss. These are some curious facts that you should know about her.
17. The 17 muscles that make up the tongue coordinate their movements with surprising agility when we perform several simultaneous processes such as breathing, swallowing saliva and speaking.
Moving.Throughout the day, this organ contracts, expands, flattens, and moves in all directions within the mouth several thousand times. And approximately 60% of the world’s population is able to roll their tongues in a U-shape thanks to a gene they share.
With bone.The extraordinary human capacity to emit sounds is due, to a large extent, to the fact that the so-called “boneless” has a skeleton formed by a horseshoe-shaped bone calledhyoids, located between the jaw and the larynx, whose design is unique to modern humans and extinct Neanderthals. Thanks to the fact that it is flexible and is not fixed in the throat, we are able to emit more sounds than any other animal.
Derision.The gesture of sticking out the tongue was known to the Greeks with the meaning of “being thirsty for blood”, and everything indicates that the Romans learned from the Gauls to use it as a gesture of mockery or mockery. In the East, however, it has been used for millennia as a greeting, and today it is still considered polite to teach the language to welcome in some areas of northern India and Tibet.
Supercatadores.25% of the planet’s inhabitants are supercatadores, that is, people who havemore than 400 taste buds per square centimeter of tongueand they perceive flavors, including sweet and fatty, more intensely than the majority of the population, which would explain why researcher Laurie Lucchina has found that super-tasting women tend to be thinner and suffer fewer problems with high cholesterol than women. non-tasting: they reject food with excess fat or sugar. At the opposite pole arethe non-tasters(25% of the population), which have only 96 papillae per square centimeter.
