The unexpected link between taste and smell

Sniffing a fragrant flower, inhaling the aroma of a good cup of coffee, breathing in your loved one’s signature scent–these are just a few of the joys you might feel deprived of when you lose your sense of smell. But smell is a surprisingly underrated sense and many of us don’t know– How DOES our sense of smell work? Is it related to taste? And if we lose it, how do we get it back? Dr. Jen Gunter walks us through the fascinating wonders and mysteries of smell, unpacks the latest neuroscience about the sense and its links to taste, and investigates how language can shape our perception of the many odors that our nose (and entire olfactory system!) picks up daily. You can read the text transcript for this episode at https://go.ted.com/BSTscript9