Empirical truth about memory is that it is not a reliable source of information no matter how confident one feels on how things occur. Check out your own memory and see how it fares. Note that many a historical/religious documents were written based on memory,  it is prudent to take ancient literature with a skeptical mind.

Human perception can be very deceptive. Its important to re-examine claims by people that do not make sense. This principle is used many magicians, bogus healers, miracle claimers or paranormal practitioners. Empirical truth is only derived when many people can arrive at the same conclusion after repeated experience.

We know for sure animals smell better than us, and that our sense of smell changes with our age. Dogs for instance are able to detect scents that go unnoticed by us.

There is a big part of our existence that goes unnoticed because we are not able to detect all the smells out there. Yet, just imagine if we could, our world will be such a smelly place that we may get sensory overload and we may be overwhelmed by the experience. 

While most people can taste different flavors like sweet, sour, spicy, salty there are people who have a highly evolved sense of taste, and are able to differentiate minute differences in additives in any food.

Wine coinsurers and cheese experts consider themselves people with a highly sensitive tasting ability. People from different parts of the world have different tolerances to the type of food they eat. Some people like their food spicy while others prefer their food moderated to enable them to enjoy the subtle differences within their range of how much spice their tongues can handle.  Then of course there are people with different diets, the vegetarians have no idea what the world is like living as a non-vegetarian person. And there are people on this planet who wonder how much people are missing out in life not having tasted their beloved delicacy of roasted spiders. The list goes on.

Some people live to eat, while others eat to live. Do people experience their world differently based on their ability to taste?

What about the other substances around us that we cannot possibly eat, like crude oil, barks of trees, chemicals etc, are we missing out on the full experience of life if we have not tasted everything?

Obviously, our tongue has its limits of experience while the world exists with thousands of tastes beyond our human experience, human tolerance and ability to detect with our small range of tongue taste buds.

For an interesting article about taste click here.

Here is what most people can sense when they touch: Hard, Soft, Smooth, Rough, Vibrations, Hot, Cold, Grit, Paste, Electric, Sharpness and much more.

What they can’t sense by touch is color, substance (glass or metal), smell etc. Also we are limited to experiencing touch only relative to our size. We cannot for instance feel fine holes in materials, or detect minuscule temperature difference or small difference in material type.

More about touch can be found here.