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The Norimaki Synthesizer is a lickable screen that can recreate almost any taste or flavor without eating food

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  1. Gaywallet
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    Super cool! I think the title is a bit sensationalized though. I'm not sure being able to mix 5 specific flavors in different concentrations will truly recreate some flavors, but it's a start. For...

    Super cool! I think the title is a bit sensationalized though. I'm not sure being able to mix 5 specific flavors in different concentrations will truly recreate some flavors, but it's a start.

    For some background, here's a paper on the basics of galvanic tongue stimulation.

    In their own paper on the Norimaki Synthesizer, they state the following:

    Due to the large diameter of the tubes, the sensation at times felt like a mixture of each taste, and sometimes it felt like multiple flavors of food were in different areas of the mouth. By reducing the diameter of the tubes and using more than one tube per taste, it should be possible to eliminate the variation in taste in different areas of the tongue.

    Indicating the possibility of more targeted elicitation of taste buds, but the idea that it could "recreate almost any taste or flavor" seems a bit far fetched to me. For example, consider the following - have you ever had multiple products from the same company where they simply use different sweeteners?

    A good example of this is artificially sweetened vs. naturally sweetened beverages. Does coke zero taste the same as coke to you? It probably doesn't, and for good reason. Some of these companies simply switched sugar to an artificial replacement, and found that even when the level of sweetness was matched, the flavor was off. This is why there is coke zero, coke zero classic, and diet coke - these all use different levels of artificial sweetener in addition to slightly tweaked formulas. If the only difference was the activation of the "sweet" sensation, there would be no need to change the other ingredients!

    The reason the other ingredients need to be changed is that there are actually groups of taste receptors bundled together and there are hundreds of different types of receptors, not just 5. If you'd like to read more of the basics on taste receptors, you might find the following Harvard blog page interesting.

    6 votes