Supertasting

This post is part of a series about rare perceptual abilities. Find the intro and updated list of articles here. Thanks to a They Might Be Giants song, I learned of supertasting young. There exists variation in which compounds people can taste and how sensitive we are to each. A supertaster has particularly rare or heightened gustatory abilities.1 Really, "supertasting" is a blanket term. Per a 2012 review, the term conflates "general" supertasters with those who have a confirmed sensitivity to propylthiouracil (the go-to test in the prior 20 years). There seems to be a lot of overlap. Studies apparently support a learned component to general supertasting but also a physiological basis on the tongue itself. On the mundane end, some people taste cilantro as bitter and soapy. This trait is genetic and varies by ancestry; for European descent, about one in six people tastes the culprit compound as bitter. I am not among them. I do, however, taste PTC as bitter.2 While PTC doesn't occur…