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
You can, it’s just way more complex.
For sound, we only have 1 type of receptor: our eardrum.
For color, we only have 3 types of receptors: red, green, and blue cones.
For taste, we only have 5 types of receptors: sweet, salty, sour, savory, and bitter.
For smell, we have up to 400 receptors.
It’s a lot easier to reproduce something when there’s only a few inputs we need to replicate.
You might ask, “Wait, if we only have 5 taste receptors, why can’t we do it easily with flavors?”
That’s because flavor is actually a combination of taste and smell — mostly smell. It’s a lot harder to replicate 405 inputs than just the 4 for audio visual
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