ABSTRACT
The chemical senses play their part too but often do so in concert with other sensory inputs to produce the integrated and unified multisensory experiences by which we come into contact with the world and come to know ourselves. In contrast to the distal senses of audition and vision, proximal senses like taste and smell are thought to concern our local sensations, some intrinsic experience of sweetness on the tongue, or a fragrant smell in the nose. Meanwhile pure tastes, which mostly contribute to our multisensory experience of flavours, are almost never recognized as tastes alone. For people who suddenly lose their sense of smell through a virus, a head injury, a tumour, or a neurodegenerative disease, the palpable change in their relations to places or buildings can be marked. Almost all our awareness of our surroundings, or of our body, is multisensory and what we call smell and taste are no exception, as we shall see shortly.
