It seems like any color or sound can be accurately encoded (and recreated) with just a few numbers. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case with smell or flavor. You can take a photo or sound recording and it’ll be a faithful recreation, but there’s no way to do that with smells or flavors. Is it a technology limitation or is there something fundamental to them that makes it harder to encode?
In: Physics
Smells have hundreds of receptors. Tastes have a reasonably limited number of receptors, but there’s significant carry-over from smell to accomplish the full experience of taste, so it effectively also needs the smell receptors.
In theory they can be encoded similarly to colour and sound, but we’re not there yet due to the complexity.
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