How do the senses of smell and taste function?

Answer 1

75% of taste is contributed by smell. "Think about when you've a cold. You've got this stuffed up nose. I mean, what did things taste like? Not so great," says Karen Kalumuck a biologist at San Francisco's Exploratorium, "That's really because we can't have the odorant molecules meet up with the sensory receptors in the nose and transmit that information to the brain."

Answer 2

Smell and Taste Work Together?The senses of smell and taste work together because

• they both rely on chemicals in food or air

So lets say you just got home from school and you say "Hi Mom" take a breath in and you smell the freshly baked cookies and your mouth starts to "water" then your mom says "Hey honey you can have a cookie or two" so you go into the kitchen and you look at the cookies and yo are looking for the one with the most Chocolate Chips and you finally see it you reach your hand down grab that cookie and you small it even if you don't mean to you do. You take a great big whiff of that cookie and you are like in heaven so you take a bite, but lets back up you are still smelling that cookie the chemicals in the air bring that smell of cookies to your nose and your receptors in your nose reacted. Now you are taking that bite of cookie and your taste buds responded to the chemicals in your cookie then the food chemicals were dissolved into saliva which that is what came in contact with your taste buds.

Answer 3

The sense of taste and smell affect each other because they are in way connected. That's why when you use nasal spray, sometimes you can taste the medicine, or even when you sneeze and milk comes out of your nose, the sense of taste and smell go hand in hand. But if you were to lose one of the two senses I think the one that you are left with will become stronger, kind of like making up for the other sense.

Answer 4

Smell is detected when molecules in the air enter the nasal cavity and bind to receptors in the olfactory epithelium. These signals are then transmitted to the brain for interpretation. Taste, on the other hand, occurs when molecules in food or liquid come into contact with taste receptors on the tongue, which send signals to the brain, allowing us to perceive different flavors.

Answer 5

There are specific receptors for different types of smell and taste. There has to be transient chemical bonding between different chemicals and different receptors of smell and taste.