We all learnt that sound is basically vibration in the air, sight is rebouncing light (or photon emission) and feel is difference in pressure. It’s easy to replicate these three senses (Eg phone can emit sound, light and vibration) relatively.
But what “creates” smell and taste and why is it so hard to replicate?
In: Chemistry
Smell and taste are some of our simplest senses. They just measure the presence of certain molecules that bump into the lining of your nose and your tongue. For instance, your tongue has receptors that send an electrical signal when they come into contact with a sugar molecule. This electrical signal is interpreted by your brain as ‘sweet’. If there are a lot of these sugar molecules, they’ll activate many receptors, so you get a stronger ‘sweet’ sensation.
These receptors work a bit like a lock that gets activated only by a key that fits. The ‘key’ in this case is a part of the molecule that’s pretty unique to sugar. Not entirely unique, though: artificial sweeteners consist of molecules that include a part with the same shape, which is why they also taste sweet: they also fit in the sweet-receptor’s ‘lock’, and thus produce the same electrical signal.
Other receptors (e.g. sour, bitter, etc.) have ‘locks’ that are sensitive to different ‘keys’. Smell is not much different in this than taste, except that you can distinguish way more separate smells than tastes. Also smell depends more on combinations of molecules activating receptors in recognizable patterns, compared to taste where each receptor by itself is responsible for a distinct taste sensation (this is simplifying things a bit, but broadly this is the case).
Smell contributes to the perceptual experience of flavor, which is why not all sweet things taste exactly the same. E.g. when you eat a piece of chocolate, your mouth (mostly) just detects a sweet taste, along with the presence of fat, but it’s your nose that detects the more complex aroma’s that give chocolate its distinct flavor. But these complex aroma’s are again just molecules, that fit into receptors in the lining of your nose.
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