Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. You know,
Speaker 1: we've spent a lot of time on this podcast talking
Speaker 1: about the senses, breaking down the senses and getting down
Speaker 1: to not only the scientific underpinnings of our sense experience,
Speaker 1: but also the sort of mysteries of it that we
Speaker 1: take for granted every day. That's true, and uh sent
Speaker 1: is one of those things that we often take for granted,
Speaker 1: but it turns out to be the hum dinger of
Speaker 1: the senses. And we're going to talk about that today.
Speaker 1: And we thought, well, heck, while we're rolling out sense
Speaker 1: and smells, we might as well roll out a little proost. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Marcel Proust eighteen seventy one through French novelist, critic and says,
Speaker 1: best known for his novel In Search of Lost Time
Speaker 1: a k a. The Remembrance of Things Past. Yes, because
Speaker 1: in this novel he has what is now known as
Speaker 1: the Proust moment, this sort of memory that is evoked
Speaker 1: by a food and in particular scent, which is as
Speaker 1: we know, bound up with food. Now This is him
Speaker 1: describing the shell shaped cookie called Madeline. He says, quote,
Speaker 1: I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea
Speaker 1: in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake.
Speaker 1: No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs
Speaker 1: touched my palette than a shutter ram through me, and
Speaker 1: I stopped intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening
Speaker 1: to me. An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses. M hmm.
Speaker 1: You know, I think we we've all had those moments
Speaker 1: in our lives where some some scent or some taste
Speaker 1: associated with the scent, uh finds. Maybe we're just walking
Speaker 1: down the street and it just we end up just
Speaker 1: time traveling in our mind back to some some moment
Speaker 1: in the past that we we maybe don't even think
Speaker 1: about all that often, you know, and we tend to
Speaker 1: not even think about how it's acting on our behavior.
Speaker 1: We've brought this up before. There was a study on
Speaker 1: altruism and freshly baked bread, and I won't go into
Speaker 1: that because it's it's a bit lengthy, but basically, people
Speaker 1: who were smelling the scent, we're much more inclined to
Speaker 1: help other people. Yeah, uh, Now, Prost goes on to
Speaker 1: to to summarize things a little bit, and he says,
Speaker 1: when nothing else subsists from the past, after the people
Speaker 1: are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, the
Speaker 1: smell and taste of things remain poised for a long time,
Speaker 1: like souls bearing resiliently on tiny and almost impalpable drops
Speaker 1: of their essence. The immense edifice of memory. Indeed, and
Speaker 1: that is that's the sort of thing that's behind the
Speaker 1: wall of smell, And that's what we're gonna look at today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is weird, how like even the most comforting smells
Speaker 1: in the world, you know, the smell of you know,
Speaker 1: of a loved one's hair or skin, or or you know,
Speaker 1: just the sort of house smells that that give you
Speaker 1: that warn't feeling inside of yourself, well you know, your
Speaker 1: favorite to meal, what have you? Something with you with
Speaker 1: rich connections. They're not something that you end up just
Speaker 1: craving all the time. But but it's only when you
Speaker 1: actually encounter them that you that they really take hold. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's light taking a book off the shelf of memory. Now,
Speaker 1: before we kind of get into these more specifics of
Speaker 1: memory and smell, let's look at a little cent one
Speaker 1: oh one, because think about all of these possible smell surrounding.
Speaker 1: You might say possible, because this sense have to be
Speaker 1: volatile enough to spew out microscopic particles in the air
Speaker 1: and then get on your noses radar system. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: so your kitchen countertops or even this table that we're
Speaker 1: podcasting at that is not a volatile material. But let's
Speaker 1: say nol our producer brings in a little bit of
Speaker 1: warmed over cabbage. Then all of a sudden, that is
Speaker 1: a huge volatile funk. Now. In the book A Natural
Speaker 1: History of the Sense of by Diane Ackerman, she writes, quote,
Speaker 1: each day, we breathe about twenty three thousand, forty times
Speaker 1: and move around four hundred and thirty eight cubic feet
Speaker 1: of air. It takes us about five seconds to breathe,
Speaker 1: two seconds to inhale, and three seconds to exhale. And
Speaker 1: in that time molecules of odor flood through our systems.
Speaker 1: Inhaling and exhaling, we smell odors. Smells code us, swirl
Speaker 1: around us and enter our bodies, emanate from us. We
Speaker 1: live in a constant wash of them. And get this,
Speaker 1: this is really interesting According to research by Stanford University scientists,
Speaker 1: which was published in a November fourth issue of Nature,
Speaker 1: each nostril of the human nose is tuned to smell
Speaker 1: some odors better than others, and the specialization moves back
Speaker 1: and forth from one nostril to the other, so one
Speaker 1: a certain smell might be more of a left nostril
Speaker 1: smell as opposed to a right nostril smell. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: there's turns out that there's a difference in airflow of
Speaker 1: nostrils and that effects scent detection, which kind of gets
Speaker 1: you to the question maybe you never even wondered about
Speaker 1: why do we have two nostrils anyway? Yeah, well it
Speaker 1: turns out there's two different systems detecting different odors. Huh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was kind of, without really thinking about it, thought
Speaker 1: it was just so that if snot clogged up one,
Speaker 1: you still had another one. You know. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like having a double barrel shotgun. Right. Indeed, all right, so,
Speaker 1: as we've discussed, you have these airborne molecules peeling off
Speaker 1: of things. A lot of molecules peeling off of something
Speaker 1: like freshly baked pie. Uh, not so much with say
Speaker 1: a lump of steel. Okay. So these molecules are floating around,
Speaker 1: they enter the nostrils and then they hit the olfactory
Speaker 1: epithelium is the center of the of olfactory sensation. Now
Speaker 1: it takes up we're talking about a mirror one square
Speaker 1: inch of the superior portion of the nasal cavity. Mucas
Speaker 1: coats the epithelium surface and it helps dissolve these odorance
Speaker 1: so they can all they gonna be properly uh taken in. Okay,
Speaker 1: Then these highly specialized olfactory receptor cells come into play. Uh.
Speaker 1: These are neurons with knob shaped tips called dendrites and
Speaker 1: old factory here's that bind with the odorants cover each
Speaker 1: of these dent drives. Next, with the odorant having successfully
Speaker 1: stimulated the receptor cell, the cell send an electrical impulse
Speaker 1: to the old factory bulb. And that is part of
Speaker 1: the brain's limbic system. That's gonna be key here in
Speaker 1: a moment because of the olympic systems relationship to memory. Okay. Now, specifically,
Speaker 1: each olfactory receptor type sends its electrical impulse to a
Speaker 1: particular microregion of the olfactory bulb. So we've gone from
Speaker 1: molecule on on all the way up into the brain.
Speaker 1: And then this is where the sensation of smell as
Speaker 1: we experience it uh in our minds emerges. Now to
Speaker 1: underscore how important smell is, let me just point out
Speaker 1: that if you destroy a neuron in the brain, it's
Speaker 1: finished forever. It won't regrow. If you damage neurons and
Speaker 1: your or eyes or ears, both organs will be irreparably damaged.
Speaker 1: But the neurons and the nose uh, those are replaced
Speaker 1: about every thirty days. And according to Diane Ackerman, unlike
Speaker 1: any other neurons in the body, they stick right out
Speaker 1: and wave in the air current like animonees on a
Speaker 1: coral reef. And I thought this is such a great
Speaker 1: similar especially if you consider some research that was done
Speaker 1: by the Cavalry Institute for Systems Neuroscience. They found that
Speaker 1: when it came to scent, there are synchronized brain waves
Speaker 1: of twenty to forty hurts moving through the brain and
Speaker 1: these are signals from the nose that translate and they
Speaker 1: connect to memories in this sort of orchestrated symphony of
Speaker 1: signals in your brain. And the reason they know that,
Speaker 1: of course is rats. Because we've discussed in an earlier
Speaker 1: episode to give us a good amount of information about
Speaker 1: these types of things and systems in the brain. Now,
Speaker 1: the researchers took seen to twenty electrodes. They place them
Speaker 1: in the hippocampus in the different areas of the into
Speaker 1: rhinal cortex and rats, and this allowed them to observe
Speaker 1: this wave like action and synchronousity happening during the scent
Speaker 1: memory acquisition in rats. Now I mentioned that the olfactory
Speaker 1: bulb is part of the brain's limbic system, again area
Speaker 1: associated with memory and feeling. That the bulb has intimate
Speaker 1: access to the amygla, which processes emotion in the hippocampus,
Speaker 1: which is responsible for associative learning. And this this is key, okay,
Speaker 1: because it's why smell can call up those memories and
Speaker 1: powerful responses almost instantaneously, cutting out we're almost cutting out conscience, remembrance.
Speaker 1: And the key triggers here are conditioned responses. You smell
Speaker 1: something and this links to an event, person, thing, or moment.
Speaker 1: The brain forges the link between smell and memory, and
Speaker 1: then when you smell it again, even years later, decades later,
Speaker 1: the link is already there lights up again. Now, since
Speaker 1: we encounter most of these new odors in our youth,
Speaker 1: because I mean, you know, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: smells out there, but you're gonna hit something. Most of
Speaker 1: the key ones, you know pretty early on, since you
Speaker 1: smell most of them in your youth. Smells often some
Speaker 1: of these strong feelings of nostalgia, mental time travel, taking
Speaker 1: us back to bake pies of our youth, or or
Speaker 1: even it's not even necessarily a positive, you know, or
Speaker 1: at least subjectively positive smell that we end up having
Speaker 1: these positive associations with. Uh. It could be something like
Speaker 1: chlorine in a pool, something that is harsh chemical uh.
Speaker 1: And to some people with a different association, and they
Speaker 1: might they might not have the same kind of positive
Speaker 1: swelling of emotion around it. But once that's forged in
Speaker 1: the brain, that's the connection we take when we smell
Speaker 1: it again. Uh. And interestingly enough, we even begin making
Speaker 1: these emotional connections to smells before we're even born. Infants
Speaker 1: who have been exposed to alcohol, cigarette smoke, or garlic
Speaker 1: in the womb actually show a preference for these smells
Speaker 1: later on. And that's really interesting of her. Before that, Um,
Speaker 1: some of your food choices can influence the diet of
Speaker 1: your child later on. But who knew that even smoke
Speaker 1: would be something that would be incorporated into the landscape
Speaker 1: of smell for an infant um. Now we're going to
Speaker 1: take a quick break. When we get back, we are
Speaker 1: going to look at how smell influenced the formation of
Speaker 1: the primitive brain. All right, we're back. We're talking about smell.
Speaker 1: We're talking about and be a very primal sense, if
Speaker 1: not the most primal sense. Yeah, and if you veer
Speaker 1: away from humans for a moment and you look at
Speaker 1: smell and its role in the animal world, will you
Speaker 1: see that it becomes maybe ten or fifteen episodes spirhirling
Speaker 1: out of this. So we're not going to go way
Speaker 1: deep into this, but we wanted to mention some of
Speaker 1: the ways that sensory world is interacting um with scent
Speaker 1: in organisms. And that's because it really plays a bigger role,
Speaker 1: a more integral role in identification and communication. So, for instance,
Speaker 1: if you think about a tobacco leaf that's being munched
Speaker 1: on by a caterpillar, well, that tobacco leaf will emit
Speaker 1: something called a green leaf volatile and this is a
Speaker 1: chemical that once it's airborne, it acts as a kind
Speaker 1: of s o s two predators of the caterpillar, like wasps,
Speaker 1: and it's essentially saying to those wops, hey, there's something
Speaker 1: there's there's this blood sucker on me or this you know,
Speaker 1: leaf sucker on me, and it is completely distracted right now.
Speaker 1: And I know you love a good juicy caterpillar to
Speaker 1: swoop down and eat it. And that in and of
Speaker 1: itself is amazing, this kind of chemical communication. But then
Speaker 1: you consider the research that's been done on rodents, and
Speaker 1: that we can see that rodents can actually detect fear
Speaker 1: through scent alone, or even considering something like a silver
Speaker 1: tip grizzly, which can smell a carcass up to eighteen
Speaker 1: miles away, which would be really important to aggressively right
Speaker 1: because that could be a second lunch, a second breakfast,
Speaker 1: a snack, you know, any sort of leftovers. And these
Speaker 1: are just just a tiny bit of examples of the
Speaker 1: rich roll of scent in the animal world. But it
Speaker 1: gets even more micro than that. Yeah, And and in
Speaker 1: doing so, it gets even more telling about just this
Speaker 1: idea of smell as this primary sense of the connection
Speaker 1: between smell and survival, because in the you know, your
Speaker 1: average day, we're not smelling out our dinner. We're not saying,
Speaker 1: all right, you know, time to get some food on
Speaker 1: the table, let me go stick my nose out in
Speaker 1: the air. But we see this, we we see this
Speaker 1: even in bacteria. According to a two thousand and ten
Speaker 1: study from the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, UH,
Speaker 1: bacteria can detect ammonia. Ammonia is an important source of
Speaker 1: nutrients for bacteria, and it causes bacteria to form slimy
Speaker 1: colonies called bio films UH and smelling it. Identifying ammonia
Speaker 1: may help the microbes to locate their food sources and
Speaker 1: avoid competitors. Now, critics of this study, you know, easily say, well,
Speaker 1: that's not smell. You're just you're you're talking about something
Speaker 1: far more primitive. But if you break down smell, if
Speaker 1: you define smell, it's just simply sensing a volatile molecule,
Speaker 1: sensing key molecules that are peeling off. As as we
Speaker 1: mentioned at the beginning, then that's exactly what's going on
Speaker 1: with these bacteria. They're not smelling oxygen because it doesn't
Speaker 1: have a smell. It's always there around them. But they
Speaker 1: can smell an important gas that signals food, which I
Speaker 1: think is really root to all animals, right, because this
Speaker 1: is the simplest and most ancient form of life from
Speaker 1: which everything else evolved. In this sort of food detection
Speaker 1: device would really play into how the primitive brain would develop.
Speaker 1: So Diane Ackerman's book, again, A Natural History of Senses,
Speaker 1: goes into this. She writes that chemical detection was so
Speaker 1: important that the scent sensitive tissue sitting atop the nerve
Speaker 1: cord developed into a primitive brain. Moreover, and this is
Speaker 1: probably the most mind blowing part of this. Our cerebral
Speaker 1: hemispheres were originally buds from the old factory stocks. Huh.
Speaker 1: So it's it's one of the prime primal scoops of
Speaker 1: ice cream on which our our additional brain scoots were placed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean these are sort of the original blueprints, right.
Speaker 1: That called back to this ability to detect detect chemicals
Speaker 1: that is like the base stock of the brain here.
Speaker 1: So much of it is fascinating, and that there's a
Speaker 1: certain level of understanding that we have conscious understanding about
Speaker 1: what's going on with our our sense of smell, and
Speaker 1: then there's all this other stuff that's going on under
Speaker 1: the surface. And a great example of This comes from
Speaker 1: a two thousand and fourteen study from Manl Chemical Sensus Center. Uh,
Speaker 1: show that that people can actually smell differences in dietary
Speaker 1: fat in foods. In other words, the nose nose when
Speaker 1: you try to pull a fast one on it with
Speaker 1: oh fat alternatives. Yeah. So have this breakdown, well, eight
Speaker 1: participants in two locations, Philadelphia and the Netherlands. Uh. And
Speaker 1: that's key here because we're gonna be dealing with with
Speaker 1: milk and uh, individuals in the Netherlands consume a lot
Speaker 1: more milk than individuals in Philadelphia. Um, they have cream cheese.
Speaker 1: Even that. Yeah, even though they have cream cheese. Uh,
Speaker 1: the Netherlands are still they're still they're still coming out
Speaker 1: on top, all right. So these participants, uh, they were
Speaker 1: made to smell samples of milk with varying amounts of fat,
Speaker 1: and they found that participants could actually distinguish among the
Speaker 1: samples based on their fat content. And and really this
Speaker 1: this makes perfect sense. It's that means as simple as this, fatty,
Speaker 1: high calorie foods equal energy and energy equal survival. So
Speaker 1: it makes perfect sense from evolutionary standpoint. You want to
Speaker 1: be able to sniff out the best source of nutrients. Um.
Speaker 1: Now it's not learned behavior, it's it's in bread behavior. UM.
Speaker 1: I already mentioned that the Dutch drink more milk than Americans,
Speaker 1: but both were equally good at sniffing out the fatty goodness. Likewise,
Speaker 1: participant weight didn't play into the results either, and they
Speaker 1: made sure that they were isolating just the fat by
Speaker 1: using powdered milk rather than fresh. Now, there's still some
Speaker 1: lingering questions here that the researchers are looking into. UM.
Speaker 1: For starters, fat molecules and milk are not very volatile.
Speaker 1: They don't peel off and float around as easily, and
Speaker 1: therefore shouldn't be that easily smelled. But they think they
Speaker 1: might be attaching to other compounds that are huh yeah,
Speaker 1: especially powdered milk right, because it doesn't have anything to
Speaker 1: help dissolve and create a vapor. UM. I think what
Speaker 1: that points to to me is that humans ability to
Speaker 1: suss out smell is you know, a little bit more
Speaker 1: complex than we thought. I mean, not dog complex. We
Speaker 1: don't have that kind of sensory world available to us,
Speaker 1: but certainly a little bit more enhanced than we thought.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to point to this idea um that
Speaker 1: or this previous idea that it was thought that we
Speaker 1: could sniff out about ten thousand smells. Well, in two
Speaker 1: thousand and fourteen, researchers from the Rockefeller University and the
Speaker 1: Howard Hughes Medical Institute put together an experiment that would
Speaker 1: blow that ability to detect ten thousand smells out of
Speaker 1: the water. And the researchers started with bottles of one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty eight distinct smells, so think about grass
Speaker 1: or citrus, right, and they mixed up to thirty different
Speaker 1: chemicals with it to create unfamiliar smells. And they did
Speaker 1: that because they wanted to really obscure what it was
Speaker 1: and really have people work with their sense of smell
Speaker 1: to suss out what sort of chemicals or odors they
Speaker 1: were sniffing. And so they took three bottles and two
Speaker 1: of those bottles were the same and one was different
Speaker 1: from it, and they had twenty six study participants quaffing
Speaker 1: these odors. And what they did is they calculated the
Speaker 1: percentage of these mixtures that participants could distinguish, and then
Speaker 1: they handed that data over to a mathematician who figured
Speaker 1: out the number of possible unique odors that could be
Speaker 1: made from the mixtures of the chemicals. Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: guess it's it's no dan no, how many one trillion? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So okay, here's the thing, though, this doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: now one connoisseurs need to start using one trillion descriptors exists, right.
Speaker 1: They are trying really hard, uh, but because this is
Speaker 1: more about distinguishing rather than identifying the smells, and it's
Speaker 1: really no indication that we're actually able to pick up
Speaker 1: on a trillion smells, because you think about you may
Speaker 1: not even be met with one trillion smells in your lifetime.
Speaker 1: It's uh, it's more just that that that's the upper
Speaker 1: limit of possible sense. And the reason why they did
Speaker 1: this study is they wanted to discredit that idea of
Speaker 1: tenos smells because it's from the early twentieth century and
Speaker 1: it's not really tied to any specific data set. Is
Speaker 1: just one of some one of those ideas that arose,
Speaker 1: and so this was that, um, this was their chance
Speaker 1: to say, no, smell is so much more complicated and
Speaker 1: nuanced than that, and our ability to detect it. We've
Speaker 1: been kind of given it short shrift for a while.
Speaker 1: We have and uh, you know, I mean as far
Speaker 1: as the senses go, you can sort of look at
Speaker 1: our technology as a good, uh, a good way to
Speaker 1: gauge how much emphasis we put on on it, right
Speaker 1: because right now I can we either of us can
Speaker 1: pick up our smartphone and we can we can send
Speaker 1: visual information, we can send auditory information. We've discussed all
Speaker 1: the different haptic technologies in place where we're we're a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of people are working really hard
Speaker 1: on being able to transmit feeling and touch across the internet. Hugs,
Speaker 1: We've talked about that. But but where's the smell, where's
Speaker 1: the where's the stank? Well. On June fourteen, the first
Speaker 1: ever transatlantic scent message was transmitted from New York City
Speaker 1: to Paris, and Harvard professor David Edwards and his co
Speaker 1: inventor Rachel Field. They they sent an image, an electronic
Speaker 1: image tagged with a scent, to Le la Boutoire, a
Speaker 1: contemporary art and design center in Paris, and they're a
Speaker 1: device called an O phone decoded the message and reproduced
Speaker 1: the scent using its aromatic cartridges. Yeah, and that the
Speaker 1: scent message that is sent, by the way, is the
Speaker 1: the scent email. If you will. The scent text message
Speaker 1: is called an O note, just just to get the
Speaker 1: lingo out there. UM. This uh, this is a technology
Speaker 1: that is still very much in its infancy. Um. Basically
Speaker 1: like where they are now with it is they're they're
Speaker 1: they're looking at being able to capture somewhere in the
Speaker 1: area of three thousand unique scents. Uh. And it's and
Speaker 1: you'd have to go to an O phone hotspot to
Speaker 1: pick one up if somebody sent one to you, Because
Speaker 1: it ultimately gets into that area of printing smells, of
Speaker 1: using primary odors as a palette, and then using combining
Speaker 1: those to try and create at least an approximation of
Speaker 1: what you're going for with what you're trying to scent.
Speaker 1: And so the exciting part of this is that scent
Speaker 1: could begin to be woven into uh, these different types
Speaker 1: of media that we consume. And so right now we
Speaker 1: have music right is being woven into the media that
Speaker 1: we enjoy, and a lot of times we don't think
Speaker 1: about how powerful that is. That even if it's just
Speaker 1: background music, it changes the mood. It gives your brain
Speaker 1: a little bit something else to hook onto and reframe
Speaker 1: the information you're getting. So just imagine if right now
Speaker 1: you guys were listening to us and we were just
Speaker 1: piping through some cabbage or or freshly baked bread, and
Speaker 1: how that might change the way that you're considering the information. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or even even more than that. It's like, and when
Speaker 1: I think of out our, our our use of music,
Speaker 1: if we're listening to music, whe we're listening to a
Speaker 1: complete composition with various notes to kind of take us
Speaker 1: on a sonic journey. So I can easily imagine a
Speaker 1: time when you plug in I guess your nostril plugs
Speaker 1: or whatever. And uh, and instead of printing with just
Speaker 1: a single smell, without it, without it just being a
Speaker 1: matter of bread or cinnabon or a certain flower, you
Speaker 1: go on a smell journey, say through a garden or
Speaker 1: through the French countryside or a spice market and Marrakesh
Speaker 1: or something of that nature. Like it. Once the technology
Speaker 1: is there and more available, like I feel like we'll
Speaker 1: sort of discover its uses more so than we can
Speaker 1: sort of predict them. Yeah. Indeed, a scratch and sniff
Speaker 1: podcast in right, and already there is some use of smells.
Speaker 1: Um and I'm talking in particular with these scent artists
Speaker 1: Setel tol Us who used sense as a study aid
Speaker 1: for students, which I other we brilliant because we already
Speaker 1: know that when you're trying to learn information that your
Speaker 1: brain is tagging things in its mind like a map, right,
Speaker 1: because it's very spatial, and layer upon that some some
Speaker 1: smells and you can really get the thumb tacks in
Speaker 1: a little bit deeper. I think, Yeah, she's she's wonderful.
Speaker 1: She's the the artist that we we both caught it
Speaker 1: the World Science Festival whild Back if I remember correctly. Um,
Speaker 1: and it's big into like don't call it stinky, like
Speaker 1: like like with children starting early, and trying to frame
Speaker 1: our our linguistic understanding of of of scent in a
Speaker 1: more nuanced way, like more than just the smell is
Speaker 1: good and the smells bad, Like what does it actually
Speaker 1: smell like? Well? And she's really challenging people with smells
Speaker 1: and what it means to them and what sort of
Speaker 1: framework it's it's creating for existence. Um. We've mentioned her
Speaker 1: before with the m I T exhibit that she had
Speaker 1: a wall painted with the sweat of fearful men. You
Speaker 1: would go and smell that wall and smell the fear.
Speaker 1: And then there was another one that she did. It
Speaker 1: was with donated coats and she did the smell profile,
Speaker 1: and I believe that one of them contained, like Chanelle
Speaker 1: number five, dog crap and soy sauce. Yeah, I mainly
Speaker 1: remember the dog crap. I think was just that her
Speaker 1: findings where there's a certain amount of of poop smell
Speaker 1: to a certain number of coats, well, and I love
Speaker 1: that it's contrasted with the Chanel number five. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a fancy lady, and yet she could not escape
Speaker 1: the fine patina a feeces covering us in the world. Indeed,
Speaker 1: you gotta scoop it up. That's the that's the law,
Speaker 1: all right. Well, there you have it, smell, how it works,
Speaker 1: how ancient it is, and when, indeed, what the future
Speaker 1: of smell might consist of. Now, if you check out
Speaker 1: the landing page for this episode on stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com, you'll also find links to previous
Speaker 1: episodes we've done that have dealt with with scent as
Speaker 1: well as other primary human senses. You'll also find all
Speaker 1: sorts of videos, blog posts, linkside to our social media
Speaker 1: accoun all sorts of good stuff at stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com the mothership of this podcast, and
Speaker 1: I bet you have thoughts um Specifically, we'd love to
Speaker 1: know about whether or not you would be open to
Speaker 1: having a scratch and sniff podcasts, or really any sort
Speaker 1: of media that would deliver some sort of pungent odor
Speaker 1: to your nostrils. You can let us know your thoughts
Speaker 1: by emailing us that blow the mind at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com for more on this and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com