https://aeon.co/essays/why-might-it-be-easier-to-fool-your-eyes-than-your-nose
Why do we generally trust our eyes? Visual object recognition seems intuitively more objective than odour perception since it builds on perspective invariance. Regardless of the angle from which you approach an object, you can recognise it as being the same thing and of the same category. A ball doesn't usually transform suddenly into a square or triangle when you approach it from the left rather than the right side. It will likewise continue to look like a ball if you paint it in another colour or spritz an odour at it. The same cannot necessarily be said about olfactory images in their ephemeral and fluctuating appearance. Contextual cues (such as a word or an image) can profoundly alter the conceptual content of an odour image in an instant - for example, from Parmesan to vomit, and back again. With visual imagery, it is usually only in the case of optical illusions of puzzle pictures such as the duck-rabbit that such radical shifts of perception occur.
By comparison, it is much harder to trick your nose. Certainly, olfaction is much more variable in its perceptual expression than vision. But this variation doesn't mean that the nose has been misled. Olfaction simply does not work analogously to the visual system. Crucially, feature coding in smell is not viewpoint-invariant. On the contrary, the causal principles of the olfactory system facilitate a cue-dependent interpretation in the computational integration of its neural signals. This inherent variability is of greater advantage when it comes to judging a contextually highly promiscuous and often unpredictable distal stimulus. The same odorant in different chemical environments can change its meaning also because you never smell chemicals on their own.
