4 ms·
Except you do have hundreds of distinct smell receptors that can detect complex chemical signals, which contribute greatly to what we colloquially call ‘taste’.
by lesam 3y ago
Except you do have hundreds of distinct smell receptors that can detect complex chemical signals, which contribute greatly to what we colloquially call ‘taste’.
Which is why food tastes very different if you lose your sense of smell, and why making artificial flavours is not just a matter of mixing a few base flavours.
- Brian_K_White 3y agoThis isn't an exception. Smell is smell not tase, and hundreds or even thousands is still nothing next to infinite. It is still a tiny finite alphabet, like the amino acids everything is built out of. Yes when we eat something we are experiencing more than just tatse, but so what? The fact that our full perception of a strawberry includes smell is as irrelevant to the validity of the concept of "a few base tastes" as the fact that it also includes sight and texture and memories of that summer job you had picking strawberries one year when you were 12. There is no Van Gogh sensor gene in your retina. There are just a very few types of light sensor, which all sight is composed of. Taste is the same. Smell is the same. Smell just has a bit larger alphabet, but it's still finite. The original comment questioned the validity of the very idea that there was any such finite alphabet. There is no possible question about that.