Gustatory Mechanisms for Neural Signaling in Rats

The current research presented in this review is important for understanding the least well known sensory system of taste and broadening what is already known about gustatory neural coding. The ways in which we value food can be more fully understood through research of the neural coding from basic taste sensations into the forebrain insular cortex areas where we give meaning to the substances we ingest and how this impacts our physiology. Peripheral and central nervous system afferent cells are known to play a role in the neural coding process based on specialist and generalists categories of neural responses to various taste qualities in the NST. Projections from the NST to the PbN provide evidence for the second relay pathway of the gustatory system to show that the taste signals converge into higher-order cortex areas for greater discrimination and better processing of taste information. Conclusions that have been made for lower levels of the gustatory relay are then applied to the fourth order gustatory relay in the thalamus in order to find any evidence for activity that gustatory neurons types found in the NST and PbN are also present in the level of the thalamus. Research surrounding the insular cortex is highly involved with the formation of taste preferences and memories that share influences with other limbic forebrain areas. The present paper follows as an accumulation of the current critical research that has been conducted on the mechanisms in the gustatory system that proceed from the NST, the PbN, the thalamus and the insular cortex for neural signaling in taste.