Wood snobs

[wafflebunny]

I was looking at something, and ran across a type of wood I'd not heard of, agarwood. It's the heartwood of a certain type of tree in Asia, that sometimes gets infected by a certain fungus. The tree then reacts by generating a certain resin to fight the infection. As such, it's apparently prized and valuable for its scent

Comments

[lizkayl]

As a large portion of our sense of taste derives from our sense of smell... I don't see any reason Not to use the same words.

[wafflebunny]

How does something smell salty, or bitter, though?

[lizkayl]

Not exactly sure on bitter, but can't you smell the ocean and tell the difference between that and a river? You really can smell salt.

[wafflebunny]

Good point. I thought that maybe it was something else that I was smelling, and associating with salt water, but I think you're right. It must just take the water to get the salt molecules to my nose if I want to do anything other than snort salt.

[firecracker_fem]

funny thing the sense of smell is completely unique in the brian. Other sensory cortices are arranged topographically. You register sounds along a strip of brain low to high pitches, and color registers across the light spectrum perfectly arranged along another patch of brain, but no one has figured out how the sense of smell is arranged in the brain.

Also oddly enough all info from your other senses travel through the thalamus first before being sent to their respective parts of the brain to be processed, except for the sense of smell, it goes straight to the olfactory cortex without taking a detour through the Thalamus.

No one has figured it out yet!