We have 5 senses: smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing. Often times this sense overlap, or interact. It's a phenomenon called sensory interaction. The correlation between smell and taste is one of the most obvious ones that we can actual experience, say when we have a cold and food doesn't taste as good. In order to savor a food, it's aroma is important. The smell of a food can amplify its taste. For example, a strawberry scent can make a drink taste sweeter. If you were to plug your nose and close your eyes, you could rely only on your seemingly weaker sense of taste and your sense of texture to identify a food. A slice of apple would be virtually indistinguishable from a chunk of raw potato. Flavor is essentially a combination of texture, taste and smell. Many people, particularly those who have texure issues, do not want to eat a food that tastes the same but is softer than usual. Sometimes the texture can offset the taste and make the food completely displeasing. But smell is important. By smelling an apple's fresh sweetness, and hearing the crisp when you slice into it, your taste is amplified because you know the familiar taste of an apple and what to expect. Through the combined senses, you know that what your eating is an apple and not a raw potato. People who have a hard time with hearing can also benefit from seeing someone mouth words, or have an improved sense of hearing by having closed captioning and being able to read along. Since the words they are hearing are being associated with words they can see or familiar mouth movements, the brain can organize interpret the hearing as if it were improved, even though it's just as bad. It takes all of our senses, in combination, to be able to completely interpret and appreciate the world. However, because of this interaction, the loss or deterioration of one sense can often be offset by the other 4 senses, and help to make sense of the world.
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