Why is it that we perceive some tastes/smells as good, while others are bad?
In: 7
Survival.
Compare the story of things that make nice smells with the story of things that make bad smells and you will find that in general goods smells come from good things like nice food, while bad smells come from bad things like spoiled food, faeces and other things we want to avoid.
This comes from millennia of evolution and association – we grew to associate good smells with good things, and bad smells with bad things. So when a certain smell causes a bad result, our bodies learned this and start to automatically trigger bad things when it detects those smells.
Rotten food for example causes illness, so our bodies learned that rotten=bad. When our bodies detect we have eaten rotten food, it then triggers a response such as vomiting to get rid of the bad stuff. If we can tell by smell that a food is rotten, that means our body can kick in this response early to better reduce the chance of us eating the bad food. So the eve result is that we instinctively know that bad smells area associated with rotten food, and we start to gag in response.
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