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posted by martyb on Friday November 13 2015, @01:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-non-scents dept.

Describe a banana. It's yellow, perhaps with some green edges. When peeled, it has a smooth, soft, mushy texture. It tastes sweet, maybe a little creamy.

And it smells like... well, it smells like a banana.

Every sense has its own "lexical field," a vast palette of dedicated descriptive words for colors, sounds, tastes, and textures. But smell? In English, there are only three dedicated smell words—stinky, fragrant, and musty—and the first two are more about the smeller's subjective experience than about the smelly thing itself.
...
Some scientists have taken this as evidence that humans have relegated smell to the sensory sidelines, while vision has taken center-field. It's a B-list sense, deemed by Darwin to be "of extremely slight service." Others have suggested that smells are inherently indescribable, and that "olfactory abstraction is impossible." Kant wrote that "Smell does not allow itself to be described, but only compared through similarity with another sense." Indeed, when Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the protagonist of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer can unerringly identify smells, remember them, and mix and match them in his head, he seems disconcerting and supernatural to us, precisely because we suck so badly at those tasks.

Hunter-gatherer groups appear to have many more words for smell.


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  • (Score: 2) by hankwang on Friday November 13 2015, @08:55PM

    by hankwang (100) on Friday November 13 2015, @08:55PM (#262827) Homepage

    I was trying to say that the amount of visual processing needed to recognize a shape is vastly more complex and would need vastly more brain capacity than what one would need to recognize a smell if you actually had the brain wired for it.

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