The sense of smell & others...

Smell is a sense that you're probably most familiar with. Even though it might not be the most used up of all the senses. This is because smell holds a secret in and of itself. Because it can sometimes have the quality of helping to remember memories. Let me go off topic here for a little bit. When it comes to eyesight, colors can combine, creating new ones. And, of course, the reality is that light has many more properties, such as contrast, or values. So, anyways, if we are only able to see a limited amount of colors, then let's ponder something perhaps way more interesting. What about smells? Sounds? Tastes? Could it be that many of the things we hear, for example, don't even "exist", in the same sense that secondary colors don't exist? Well, the thing about human senses is that, each one is different in it's own unique way. Hearing depends on how sound waves behave before, or upon, reaching our ears. So sound is like vision in a way, as sound waves can interact with each other to change the tone of the sound waves. Let's get back to the sense of smell then. Unlike our visual receptors, smell depends on many more sensory receptors, as does taste. However, even though taste and smell receptors are very complex, they still have their limits. If two or more smells were to combine together, you're sensory receptors might fool you into thinking that you're smelling one thing, while you're actually smelling other smells. And it's not totally unlikely that say, a fragrance will combine with an odor, to create another... odor? Or would it now smell like an aromatic fragrance? Or, the third possibility is that you may find yourself indifferent to the smell. So, here's the thing: whenever you're starting to sense something, and you are wondering, "what is that smell?", just remember that you might just be caught up in an "illusion"- not necessarily one that's optical- one that's sensory. It's very likely that with many new tastes, sounds, feelings, and /or smell we will encounter in the future will make us develop new sensory receptors. The interesting thing about some of our senses is that they can't be merely measured by means of comparison. Take smell , for instance. How do we describe an unknown smell to someone? If it were a color, then we could easily just point to a similar color on a color graph. With smell, it's way more difficult. The best we can probably do for now is to come up with a map, in which smells are mapped out, in relation to other smells. Then we can chart that smell by saying that it smells more like this smell than it does another.