Smell and Taste Are Not the Same, Right?

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i would have intuitively thought that my personal sense of taste is more subtle, and then my sense of smell, maybe im jus not very good at smelling things. But i get the feeling that there's a molecular kind of fit and lock and key mechanism going on when we talk about the sense of taste and smell. There are receptors that are specially shaped that to recognize different molecules around us. And those receptors are the sort of fundamental lego bris that our sense of smell operates on. The universe of possible smells is huge, er ander, and certainly more vast than our genetic repertoire of odor receptors. So has to be this quite complicated, combinatorial code that

All of us construct models of the world, and update them on the basis of evidence brought to us by our senses. Scientists try to be more rigorous about it, but we all do it. It’s natural that this process will depend on what form that sensory input takes. We know that animals, for example, are typically better or worse than humans at sight, hearing, and so on. And as Ed Yong points out in his new book, it goes far beyond that, as many animals use completely different sensory modalities, from echolocation to direct sensing of electric fields. We talk about what those different capabilities might mean for the animal’s-eye (and -ear, etc.) view of the world.

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Ed Yong received Masters and Bachelors degrees in zoology from Cambridge University, and an M.Phil. in biochemistry from University College London. He is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic. His work has appeared in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among his other awards are the George Polk award for science reporting and the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for in-depth reporting. His new book is An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.

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