Abstract
The taste system is ideal for investigations of temporal coding, because neural taste responses are time extensive and often difficult to differentiate by magnitude alone. In a recent article, Roussin et al. 2008 show that spike-time patterning provides a necessary and efficient source of information about tastes that would be otherwise nearly impossible to discriminate—within-type pairs of tastes such as sucrose and fructose, which are both sweet. The authors then go beyond their basic analysis, showing the precision of brain stem taste temporal codes.