00:01
For this question, we're being asked about the similarities and differences between our sense of smell and our sense of taste.
00:12
And i'm going to answer the question making a kind of a table, sort of a gesture towards a table rather than a real table.
00:20
And i'll start here with what is similar between our sense of smell and our sense of taste.
00:29
And the big similarity, of course, is that both of these are forms of chemoreception.
00:36
So molecules dissolved in tiny little droplets of liquid are what is being detected in the case of both smell and in taste.
00:50
So both these are examples of chemo reception.
00:54
They both use chemo receptors to detect molecules.
01:03
So they're very similar in that they're both sort of doing the same general thing of detecting molecules.
01:14
So that's really the big similarity between them.
01:18
There may be other similarities that you can think of, but for the most part, our sense of taste and our sense of smell are really fairly different, despite this overall similarity.
01:30
So let's just talk a little bit about how they're different.
01:33
So perhaps the biggest difference is that in the sense of smell, you have lots and lots of chemoreceptor molecules, and they each has a different kind of protein on its surface for detecting a limited number of odor molecules.
01:59
So each protein detects a handful of different kind of odor molecules.
02:04
And a particular smell, let's say, if perfume, has a wide variety of different kinds of odor molecules, and that sets off, right, action potentials that go into the brain as a signal for that particular kind of odor.
02:28
Another way to say that is that your ability to detect odors is finer grain than your ability to detect taste...