An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

Taste is reflexive and innate, while smell is not.

(We tend to wrongly equate taste with flavor, when the latter is more dominated by smell. That’s why food seems bland when you have a cold: Its taste is the same, but the flavor dims because you can’t smell it.)

Odors, by contrast, “don’t carry meaning until you associate them with experiences,” Caprio says.

And while smell can be put to complex uses—navigating the open oceans, finding prey, and coordinating herds or colonies—taste is almost always used to make binary decisions about food. Yes or no? Good or bad? Consume or spit?

Smell works at a distance; taste works through contact.

the smells that distinguish one person’s scent from another’s are not pheromones. Indeed, despite the existence of pheromone parties where singletons sniff each other’s clothes, or pheromone sprays that are marketed as aphrodisiacs, it’s still unclear if human pheromones even exist. Despite decades of searching, none have been identified.[*15]

the Jahai can name smells as easily as English-speakers can name colors.

The myth of poor human olfaction “might have been overridden much earlier if the humans under consideration had been Jahai instead of Brits and Americans,” Majid tells me.

The English language confirms his view with just three dedicated smell words: stinky, fragrant, and musty. Everything else is a synonym (aromatic, foul), a very loose metaphor (decadent, unctuous), a loan from another sense (sweet, spicy), or the name of a source (rose, lemon). Of the five Aristotelian senses, four have vast and specific lexicons.