That basic nervous tissue has two big functions — sensing stimuli and sending electrical impulses throughout the body, often in response to those stimuli.
It would be another 30 years before we knew what a neuron really looked like, but Gerlach's famous neural stain was a breakthrough in our understanding of nervous tissue.
Notice that these are specialized epithelial cells, not nervous tissue, so they still have to synapse to sensory neurons that carry information about the type and amount of taste back to your brain.
This led to a pernicious myth that Stegosaurus had, if not an actual second brain, at least a separate bundle of nervous tissue that helped control its tail and legs.
On the possibility of explaining away the difference as due to the peculiarities of nervous tissue I have spoken before, but this possibility must not be forgotten if we are tempted to draw unwarranted metaphysical deductions.