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[rydra_wong]

From Wired:

What’s Up With That: Why Are Smells So Difficult to Describe in Words?

A fascinating and readable write-up of the neuroscience and psycholinguistics on this subject.

Sample:

In fact, he thinks it might be the very directness of the connections between olfaction and language in the brain that contributes to our odor-naming difficulties. The information the olfactory system passes on to our language centers is crude and relatively unprocessed, like a few notes scribbled on the back of a napkin. The information sent on from the auditory and visual system, in contrast, is more like a polished draft, having gone through more steps, and presumably more refinement, in specialized sensory regions of the brain.