Abstract: Taste and oral somatosensation are intimately related to each other from peripheral receptors to the central nervous system. Oral astringent sensation is thought to contain both gustatory and oral somatosensory components. In the present study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we compared the cerebral response to astringent stimuli (tannin), with the response to one typical taste stimulus (sweet - sucrose) and one typical somatosensory stimulus (pungent - capsaicin). We observed three distributed brain sub-regions respectively located in Lobule IX of cerebellar hemisphere, right side of dorsolateral superior frontal gyrus and left side of middle temporal gyrus, which responded significantly different to the three types of oral stimulations, suggesting that these regions play a role in the discrimination of sucrose, tannin and capsaicin solutions. In addition, we observed overlapping activations in sub-region of the insula co-activated by three types of stimulations, suggesting the convergence of gustatory and oral somatosensory inputs in the insula. This study was supported by in-house funds from the department of Otorhinolaryngology of the TU Dresden.