You might remember being shown a ‘taste map’ in a textbook at school like the one above, where the tongue is divided into regions, each one being responsible for detecting a particular taste: 1 is bitter, 2 is sour, 3 is salt and 4 is sweet. This is another misconception about the sense of taste.
The taste map theory was found to be false in 1974 by a scientist called Virginia Collings.  Virginia reexamined a paper written in 1901 by German scientist called D.P. Hanig which had given rise to the tongue map theory. Â