2006/06/25

Languages of senses: taste and smell

Today, we normally think of languages through our 3 senses: sight for written words and sign languages, hearing for spoken words, and touch for Braille. How about the other 2, smell and taste? One could create flavored strip language such that you taste words! (My sons would love that!) You'll need a printer ink that's flavored to make it easy to write (you may need to create two sets one for sending and one for verifying/review) -- I suppose you can skip the middle man and deposit the flavored ink directly into people's tongue. Imagine what a chat session would be like!

Smell would be harder to "send" via postal mail, but I guess you can print both smell and taste on one strip. Unfortunately, depositing smell directly into one's nose will be slower since smell differences are harder to distinguish than taste (I doubt research has been pursued to make smell into an effective language and figured what the max "bit rate" is).