Taste is a complicated behaviour. It used to be thought that there were separate receptor cells (taste buds) on different parts of your tongue for each of the five basic tastes: salt, sweet, sour, bitter and umami (the taste of glutamic acid). However there are taste buds throughout the oral cavity, even on the upper palate and each taste bud is capable of detecting all the basic tastes. It's just that some are more sensitive to a particular taste than to the others.

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A full bladder is uncomfortable and creates a sense of urgency in our mind. The conflict between the desire to take action to relieve the stress and the fact that circumstances don’t currently permit us to, gets translated into various rhythmic displacement behaviours. These include humming to ourselves, clenching and unclenching muscles or hopping from foot to foot, despite the fact that remaining still and calm actually allows you to last for longer.  Another example of displacement behaviour is when a person scratches their head when they don’t know which of two options to choose.

Displacement Behavior Definition

Performance of an act inappropriate for the stimulus or stimuli that evoked it. It usually occurs when ‘an animal’ is torn between two conflicting drives, such as fear and aggression. Displacement activities in animals often involve actions that bring comfort such as scratching, drinking or feeding.

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The world around us is populated with often unseen organisms that depend on us for survival. Scanning electron photography gives us a glimpse into some of the organisms that live in and around the "micro-universe of you".

A symbiotic relationship between a parasite and a host can have beneficial effects. Unfortunately, as in the examples below, many of these parasites have no regard for their human hosts, consuming our food and nutrients, destroying tissue and producing toxic waste products that can make us seriously ill.

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