Smell is taste from far away

Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein, MD

16 Jul 2025 — 2 min read

This weekend I read the book Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. If you liked The Martian, you’ll love this. And like The Martian, I recommend reading the book before this movie comes out in the spring.

The book includes a conversation about the anticipated differences and similarities between life on different planets. I don’t want to go into detail and ruin any suspense, but the discussion about the senses got me thinking.

We are taught that people have 5 senses to connect us with the world around us; touch, smell, taste, vision and hearing. In Project Hail Mary, the characters decide that the sense of smell is actually the sense of taste from afar.

That made me wonder, is the sense of hearing actually the sense of touch from afar? Both respond to changes in mechanical forces. If this were a simpler way of looking at our senses, then should we be re-taught that people have 3 senses; taste, mechanical force and sight?

No.

The sense of touch is more than force detection. Touch also is used to sense position. And smell does not detect the same things as taste. Smell detects the presence of volatile organic compounds in the air – essentially molecules that spontaneously turn into a vapor that spreads through the air. We have 5 senses.

Why do I share this simple consideration? Because this is how discovery works. Let loose with your curiosity. Suspend your commitment to already knowing the truth. Listen. Watch. (Or use any of your other senses that are relevant.) These are steps that allow for creativity and discovery. And for me, almost all the time I start on one of these “diversions” I do not make any important discovery. Which is fine. It’s not failure. It’s part of the process of discovery. And we need to keep discovering.

How does this matter to someone with Parkinson’s? I’m not sure it does directly, but I do know that this kind of analysis is how we develop hypotheses, test them and then reject, accept or modify them. And that is the process by which we are going to conquer the disease.