In the morning, you walk into your kitchen half asleep. You smell the earth. It’s the coffee you just made. You touch the white mug to your lips. It’s hot. Too hot to drink. You wait for it to cool watching the smoke billow from the top. The phone rings. You don’t want to answer it. The rising sun doesn’t permit conversation. The phone stops ringing. Your coffee has cooled. You sip. It’s bitter. You’re out of milk.
This story contains the five senses: sight, taste, sound, smell, touch. The human experience can be broken down into these five categories more or less. Probably more. There’s also the emotional and spiritual part, but let’s ignore those for now. These five senses quantify the physical human experience.
Sight consists of colors. There are so many colors, right?
Wrong.
Remember the rainbow? There are only seven colors. Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Blue. Indigo. Violet.
None of this magenta, burnt sienna, aquamarine, baby sky blue, mango tango, chartreuse, rain forest green, sad puppy brown crap.
There are only 7 colors. In fact, let’s go even further because orange is just red and green is just yellow and indigo and violet are just blue.
There are 3 colors: Red, Green, Blue. Also known as the primary colors.
“But Jason, what about white?”
Easy. White is all the colors.
“What about black?”
Black is the absence of color. But I like to think of it as a color we can’t see, much like a locked character in a video game.
Your entire life consists of 3 colors.
Kind of pathetic if you think about it. I mean, what are you even doing? Did you know mantis shrimp can see 12? A little shrimp can see 4 times as many colors as you. Your eyes suck. Step up your game human.
What about taste? How many tastes are there?
There are 5: sweet, bitter, salty, umami, sour. Sweet is when you bite into that 3rd, 4th, 5th cookie you weren’t supposed to have. Bitter is when you realize the cookies have dark chocolate chips. Salty is when you realize that the 5th cookie wasn’t a cookie but a saltine cracker. Umami is the cheese you found on the saltine cracker. Sour is the acid reflux you get due to the cracker and cheese being 2 years old and from the couch cushion.
What about smell? How many smells?
Smell is the sense most closely linked to memory. We have a lot of memories, so there must be an equal amount of smells.
Again wrong. How do you not know this? Do I have to teach you everything?
What’s that? You didn’t ask?
Well, I’ll tell you any way.
There are ten smells: sweet, fragrant, woody, fruity (non-citrus), chemical, minty, popcorn, lemon, decaying, pungent.
All of these make sense (pun intended) except for one.
Popcorn. Why is popcorn its own smell?
I like to imagine a bunch of scientists in a room testing different smells and categorizing them. There are a bunch of beakers and Bunsen burners and microscopes and… stethoscopes? You know, science stuff. One guy, let’s call him Steve, goes, “Phew! I think that’s all of them. We did it guys. That’s all of the smells. Every smell ever can be put into these 9 categories. You heard it here first. There are only 9. There are no others. I can’t think of any. We spent years researching this and I’m glad we’re finally done. We all worked hard. I think it’s finally time to submit our research.”
Then Jerry comes back from his 7th “bathroom break” munching on a bag of popcorn. With his mouth full, Jerry says, “Oh, are we done?”
Everybody in the room sniffs the air. There’s a long, uncomfortable silence. All the tired and weary scientists look angrily at Jerry. Steve almost cries in desperation.
Mouth still full, Jerry goes, “What I do?”
Steve mumbles to himself, “I’m so sick of this I just want to go home,” as he impatiently writes down the tenth smell.
The last two are hard.
Can you quantify sound? It’s not infinite. There’s definitely a range we can hear. But when in musical form, there’s another dimension to sound: time. It’s the only sense that doesn’t occur in a singular instance. It can be played with rhythm and melody. Rhythm and melody need time. Different sounds evoke different feelings when played over a duration of time. In this case, sound can’t be quantified. How do you quantify music?
Quantifying music and sound is too ambitious.
What about touch?
I want to say it’s binary; either it is or it isn’t.
But that’s wrong.
Because there’s rough and smooth and hard and soft.
Is taste included in touch?
What about your insides? Is a tummy ache a touch sense?
What about pain?
I don’t know.
Let’s leave it for now.
What’s amazing is that we all experience these five senses. They all make us human.
Yet we often argue about them. We don’t see eye to eye.
“I love the taste of broccoli.”
“Broccoli is gross and you’re an idiot.”
We all experience these senses differently. We all have our preferences. Our favorite colors and tastes and songs. But the senses never change. These senses are always the same.
What’s different is us. We are different. We all experience the same human senses, but our favorite ones define who we are.
Our taste in senses make us special.
I think that’s awesome.