Which would you give up?

[Leopardess]

"After all smell and taste are not listed as the same sense. So it would not make logical sense that the loss of one would diminish the other."

There is a true physiological connection here. You can read "Natural History of the Senses" by Diane Ackerman to get a discription of it. About 80-90% of taste is affected by smell. This is why wine connoisseurs inhale the smell of the wine before tasting it. Without the smell, the taste is greatly diminished. If you plug your nose while eating/drinking harsh things, like mustard, citric acids, etc, you don't "taste" it as much. There are many cases where people lost their sense of smell (anosmics) and could not taste food at all. It is a true statement that loss of smell affects taste.

I would vote for taste. Sight is out of the question, hearing is out of the question. Touch - my god. I'd rather lose with or hearing. Smell? Affects taste - affects interactions between people (most people can tell by an article of clothing was worn by a man or woman, even without a "gendered" perfume).

Smell helps alert us to dangers, we smell all the time. In fact, it is the only sense we truly do completely involuntarily at all times. We can smell fire, food, sexual pheromones, toxins, bad air, etc etc. It affects taste and stimulates appetite. Food that has no smell is not typically appealing.


So yes, taste. Food would be thorougly unenjoyable - but it'd make dieting a lot easier!

For anyone interested in this question, I really do suggest "A Natural History of the Senses" by Diane Ackerman. It's an awesome book, divided into sections of senses and it discusses each one in some great depth. It's not boring, it's a fun read and the writing is beautifully poetic.

EDIT: Here you go.

Smell and taste are closely linked. The taste buds of the tongue identify taste; the nerves in the nose identify smell. Both sensations are communicated to the brain, which integrates the information so that flavors can be recognized and appreciated. Some tastes—such as salty, bitter, sweet, and sour—can be recognized without the sense of smell. However, more complex flavors (raspberry, for example) require both taste and smell sensations to be recognized.

http://www.merck.com/mmhe/sec06/ch097/ch097a.html

What we refer to as taste is actually flavour. Flavour is a combination of taste and smell sensory information.
"As much as 80% of what we call "taste" actually is aroma" (Dr Susan Schiffman quoted in Chicago Tribune, 3 May 1990)

"Ninety percent of what is perceived as taste is actually smell" (Dr Alan Hirsch of the Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago, quoted in MX, Melbourne, Australia, 28 Jan 2003).

Smell is more sensitive than taste: threshold for sucrose (taste) is between 12 and 30mM (millimolar) depending upon test used. Strychnine is a very powerful taste (apparently), and can be tasted at 10-6M (one micromolar). As for smell, mercaptan can be detected at 7x10-13Molar. Taking into account the relative volumes needed for taste and smell (you sniff a greater volume of air than you taste a liquid), smell is 10,000 times more sensitive than taste (Moncrieff, R.W. "The Chemical Senses", 3rd ed., Leonard Hill, London, 1967).

http://www.cf.ac.uk/biosi/staff/jacob/teaching/sensory/olfact1.html#Tasteandsmell

In addition to signal transduction by taste buds, it is also clear that the sense of smell profoundly affects the sensation of taste. Think about how tastes are blunted and sometimes different when your sense of smell is disrupted due to a cold.

http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/digestion/pregastric/taste.html

Since most of what people perceive as "taste" actually results from their sense of smell

http://scentsationaltechnologies.com/aroma.cfm

 

[Watcher74]

"Ninety percent of what is perceived as taste is actually smell"

Exactly. So 90% of what most people "think" is taste is not taste at all. It is smell. Therefore losing the sense of smelling does not diminish your ability to taste at all. Only the misconception of people believing that what they are smelling is actually taste.

I've thought on this. Eat one of your favorite foods with your nose clamped.

Then, place that same food right in front of you with your nose unclamped and chew up and eat something like...well the most tasteless thing you can think of. Paper pulp, unsalted rice cakes, whatever.

I would think that being tempted by smelling something that is mouth watering without actually being able to truthfully taste it would be much worse than eating something with a cold where you couldn't smell it.

Wouldn't it make you frustrated? I think it would drive me mad.

 

[smurf]

I like to see fish
I like to touch fish
I like to taste fish....sorry
I don't like to smell fish but other things I do
I have never heard a fish so vote for no hearing

 

[fishcatch22]

I voted for taste, because it is your weakest sense and would impact my life the least.

 

[dorkfish]

I have never heard a fish so vote for no hearing

DO you want to?


THe Cichlid Scene

Watch the videos of the striped midas (second fish on the side, coloured grey with striping).

But, I chose to lose hearing too, I could cope with losing a lot easier than all the other senses.