Can we smell the acidity of a wine?

originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Smells like teen spirit?
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and i forget just why i taste
oh, yeah, i guess it makes me smile
i found it hard, it's hard to find
oh well, whatever, nevermind

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originally posted by MLipton:
A funny story related to me: back in the '30s in Texas, gas companies hired a number of men to inspect natural gas pipelines for leaks (and fix the leaks once discovered). One man in particular was noted for his uncanny ability to locate leaks much faster than the norm. When asked how he did it, he replied that he just looked for the circling vultures. The birds were attracted to the thiol odorant in the natural gas, mistaking it for the smell of a carcass, so the man would just scan the sky for a flock of vultures circling and drive to that location.
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A similar story was related to me: Natural gas delivery in big cities is notorious for something on the order of 5% of product simply disappearing. That is a huge loss so the gas companies pay (or, used to pay) for people who can identify leaks. One fellow was particularly successful and he was eventually persuaded to reveal his method: he looks for certain discolorations on building facades which he has empirically learned are associated to higher-than-average amounts of gas in their vicinity.
 
originally posted by MLipton:


Interesting link, my corpulent colleague. I wish that they had done the companion experiment to see how long (or even if) it took the receptors to fully recover from their downregulation. Anecdotally, I have encountered chemists who've worked extensively with sulfur-containing smelly things and whose ability to smell such has attenuated to nothingness. This appears to be a long-term effect.
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good questions all. some of the answers lie, i think in part, with the fact that what i call "learning" above is itself a gross simplification. there are many learning circuits in the brain, and while some of them seem to largely recover from the kind of local adaptation studied in the paper, others are coding shit for the longer term.

from a computational perspective, i sometimes fear that everything we ever learn must come at some perceptual cost, however infinitesimally small. the alternative seems to put a belief in sprites and vapours above newton's third law.

but this strays too close to teh day job, so i'll take a pass here if that's ok.

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