The Color Of Smell

As human beings we tend to take things for granted and often think that the whole world revolves around us and our ~superior~ species, but as nature would have it, we're really not all that perfect, especially when it comes to our senses.

Humans have very good eye sight and can see an estimated 10 million or more colors, which is quite incredible compared to most animal species... BUT!... consider for a moment our sense of smell.

Now, comparatively speaking, a dog for example has a sense of smell roughly FORTY TIMES greater than a human being! A number which, seems pretty impressive, but it's really kind of hard for us humans to really grasp that difference, since we really have no way of knowing what it is that we're actually missing.

Keeping that in mind, and being inspired somewhat by the interpretation of sound into graphics in the movie Mr. Holland's Opus, in order to give deaf people a way of, effectively, "seeing sound", I figured I could do something similar with smell.

We humans are effectively near deaf, or near blind as far as our sense of smell, compared to that of a dog. Let's say we take an image that has roughly 450 thousand colors:

If Smell Was Color - Dog

Let's say that, that is the full amount of what a dog can "smell" (in color). Now how would a human's sense of "smell" (in color) compare to that? Well, looking at pure colors, forty times less than that would be roughly 11 thousand colors. As such, there are a variety of ways we can present our near "deafness" of smell, by reducing the overall color gamut, by reducing the saturation, by decreasing the brightness, etc, etc...all of which would provide an end result of less overall color.

So, with that in mind I created two artistic models of color reduction, utilizing a variety of methods including color reduction, contrast and brightness alteration, saturation reductions, shadow and midtone alterations and gamma alteration, that represent our limited sense of smell in a visual representation, right nyah:

If Smell Was Color - Human - 01

If Smell Was Color - Human - 02

Pretty neat, huh? Kinda scary when you think about all that we're missing out on in life, all that we could have, that we could experience...if we were only dogs.

It's interesting to think of what the future might hold, as science advances, advanced brain to computer interaction may become possible, which may enable us to experience things that we never could in our normal human bodies, to be able to smell in the way that a dog can perhaps, or it could even allow us to create brand new senses that don't even exist in nature as we know it. A Matrix like world where being able to fly like Neo would seem like a cheap parlor trick compared to the level of experience that could be truly offered by such a near limitless construct.

You might liken it to the use of heroin, which can allow you to experience pleasure levels dozens of times greater than the most intense sexual pleasure, which is generally the maximum level of pleasure the human body is capable of achieving on its own.

The problem however with the human brain is that if you're getting too much pleasure, well your brain starts shutting off and closing pleasure receptors, which means it takes more and more of the drug to be able to keep experiencing that intense pleasure and if you suddenly stop, well those receptors take quite some time to "open back up" so to speak, which basically creates withdrawal and feelings of horribleness.

But, if we can wire our brains into a computer, it would theoretically be possible to experience those pleasure levels constantly, without any degree of tolerance, and without any physical sense of withdrawal from stopping. It would still be addictive of course, and it likely would have a large psychological impact, after all, if you could feel pleasure that intensely all the time, well regular things like eating, socializing, creating things and even sleeping wouldn't really give you any form of comparable satisfaction, and as such you likely would just stop doing them altogether...until you died.

On the other hand though, with such precise control, we could effectively use pleasure in a controlled manner in order to manipulate our behaviors. For example you could up the overall level of pleasure in the brain by a small factor and then have some kind of control software in place that could, basically, reduce that level of pleasure say...every time you started biting your nails...or say every time you started eating. Used in that way it could be very beneficial to us. Of course on the other, other flip side, it could also be used to effectively manipulate people in any number of horrible ways.

To put it simply...the future is gonna be pretty interesting. ^__^