The use of anesthesia has two purposes. First we propose to anesthetize localized areas in the mouth in order to further quantify an effect observed in preliminary experiments. The effect observed was that when the chorda tympani taste nerve was anesthetized, subjects preceived increased taste intensities instead of decreased intensities as one would expect. We propose to test localized areas within the mouth to determine whether the increase occurs in some special area or is generally present on all unanesthetized areas. Second we propose to use topical anesthesia to help determine the locus of a troublesome taste sympton: dysgeusia.
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