A really bright light can make me blind. A really loud noise can make me deaf. Can a really strong flavour break my taste buds? Or a strong odour break my sense of smell?
A really bright light can make me blind. A really loud noise can make me deaf. Can a really strong flavour break my taste buds? Or a strong odour break my sense of smell?
People here keep listing diseases and chemicals when OP is asking about taste and smell.
Unless you’re drinking bleach, food will never destroy your sense of taste. It’s the same with smell. There are chemicals that are really smelly and can destroy your nose, but smell ≠ nose destruction.
So light and sound intensity are continuous scales. They also are physics but taste and smell are chemicals. Chemistry, molecule properties are a discrete scale. Now you make a distinction between food chemicals and non-food but that distinction is already based empiracally on “what tastes good and does no harm” so a poor choice for this answer.
OP is asking if the intensity of the smell or taste can inherently destroy your sense of it.
You could activate every single taste bud on the tongue or every single olfactory neuron in your nose to max feels and suffer no lasting damage. Your taste buds and smell neurons get replaced regularly. Your eyes and ear hairs don’t. You don’t need to drink bleach to know how it tastes. You can make a safe equivalent made with non-dangerous chemicals that activate all the same spots. You can’t do the same for light or sound.
I think this is what I was going for, if a smell or taste could be so overwhelmingly powerful that it could permanently destroy the ability to smell or taste again. But it seems the mechanisms the various senses use are so different that it just doesn’t work that way. I have enjoyed reading all the replies though.