I don’t care what anyone says. It seems to me, the variety of smells you can smell and tastes you can taste, must almost be endless.
I know there are certain things just found in nature, like lemon or peppermint. But take the taste/smell of root beer and cola. How do you describe these things if you never had them before? You see what I mean.
Anyways, my question is just this (to quantify my suspicions in a simple question): if you smelled a plant, a flower or food, let’s say, from an alien planet man has never been before, what would it smell like? Would it smell like something you never smelled before? Or would you say, Wow, that smells just like peppermint, e.g.
The question you’re asking here has more to do with the vocabulary we English-speakers use for scents. (I’m assuming, OP, that you’re a native English-speaker; my apologies if this is not so.) Our language is fairly poor in words for scents, despite the fact (as you note) that we can differentiate a huge number of scents.
Now, if you spoke a language with a richer scent vocabulary, we might not be having this discussion. I’m confident that if I saw an alien object that no person had seen before, I would be able to describe its color in English, because English has a lot of color-related words. My guess is that a Jahai speaker (the language in the above link) would feel more confident that he/she could describe a completely alien scent.
You smell whatever chemicals your olfactory receptors can bind with and olfactory receptors are flexible.
Rather than binding specific ligands, olfactory receptors display affinity for a range of odor molecules, and conversely a single odorant molecule may bind to a number of olfactory receptors with varying affinities,[8] which depend on physio-chemical properties of molecules like their molecular volumes .
So if the alien “smell” comes from molecules your receptors can bind, then yes, you smell something. It’s possible that alien molecules might mimic something like peppermint, but only because they are binding to the same receptors in the same ratios as natural peppermint.
I thought this question was going to be about something different. You can only see a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. You can only hear sounds between 20Hz and 20kHz, at best, and nothing outside that range.
I’m not sure what the limits of touch are, but I can imagine there are touches so light that you can’t feel them and “touches” that are so large as to obliterate you and your nerves before you have the chance to feel them. Taste is pretty narrow to begin with. Sweet, salty, sour, bitter and hot.
Are there similar (well-defined or otherwise) limits to what we can smell?
