Development of Taste Recognition System Utilizing Chaotic Dynamics

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Chemical senses in higher animals have a conspicuous character, in which a considerably large number of kinds of chemical substances are received simultaneously and classified quickly into several simplified senses, such as sourness, bitterness, saltiness, sweetness and umami. In this study, we tried to construct an artificial taste recognition system by using lipid membranes as transducers and using a coupled-oscillator system, which can exhibit chaotic oscillatory dynamics, as a taste-information processor.Highly-ordered lipid membranes were fabricated using the Langmuir-Blodgett technique. Responses of the lipid membranes to various kinds of taste substances were investigated by measuring changes of membrane potentials and membrane impedances. The surface plasmon resonance method was also applied to detect structural changes of the lipid membranes induced by adsorptive taste substances. Their experiments revealed various processes inside and on the surface of the lipid membranes.Dynamical behaviors in a coupled-oscillator system, which is a kind of simple neural network model, was studied both numerically and analytically. Statistical mechanical analysis clarified macroscopic behaviors of retrieving processes even in a strongly nonlinear regime. It was also shown that the system can exhibit wide variety of oscillatory phenomena, which were induced by adequate input signals which might be corresponding to taste stimuli.