Speaker 1: Pushkin. Being a podcaster means you sometimes get some strange
Speaker 1: and unexpected deliveries. You see, whenever I read an ad
Speaker 1: for the show, it's only for a product that I
Speaker 1: know and like, and that means I'm often checking out
Speaker 1: new products before advertising them to you on the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 1: I often come home to random packages waiting for me
Speaker 1: on my doorstep. Our ads are what keeps the show going,
Speaker 1: which means you can keep listening to the Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: for free. But the other reason I love our advertisers
Speaker 1: is that the people who work at the companies who
Speaker 1: sponsor us are usually fans of the Happiness Lab, just
Speaker 1: like you. That's why they want to support the show
Speaker 1: and all the work we do. Take for example, my
Speaker 1: most recent delivery a colorful box of soaps and cleaners,
Speaker 1: which had a handwritten note inside. We are so excited
Speaker 1: to work with you. We are big fans, it said,
Speaker 1: Please enjoy some of our favorite products. Thanks missus Myers.
Speaker 1: These sentence samples around at the absolute perfect time, because
Speaker 1: over the past few months, I've gone on a bit
Speaker 1: of an olfactory journey. It's a challenge I started after
Speaker 1: I chatted with the Great Happiness Expert Gretchen Ruben.
Speaker 2: For some people, I think that this can be kind
Speaker 2: of an overlooked sense.
Speaker 1: Last year I spoke to Gretchen about her new book
Speaker 1: Life in Five Senses, which explores how we can get
Speaker 1: more joy from paying attention to the sights and sounds
Speaker 1: around us, but also to the smells. Gretchen says, we
Speaker 1: often neglect the impact that odor can have on us.
Speaker 1: She told me I should try harder to curate the
Speaker 1: smells that surround me.
Speaker 2: There's both eliminating the negative, which is what are the
Speaker 2: things that are bringing you down or draining you, and
Speaker 2: then the adding, which is what are the things that
Speaker 2: will make it feel richer. So you could say, like, okay,
Speaker 2: I'm in my home office, like maybe there's something that
Speaker 2: smells bad that I need to get rid of. Or
Speaker 2: you can add something good, whether that's making sure that
Speaker 2: you open the windows so that you get fresh air
Speaker 2: and the smell of the outdoors, or a plant or
Speaker 2: a scented candle.
Speaker 1: Who am I to argue with Gretchen Ruben? And so
Speaker 1: I've been working hard to eliminate smells I don't like
Speaker 1: and to introduce new sense that I do. But the
Speaker 1: process of paying attention to the sense I like has
Speaker 1: been kind of strange. I found lots of objectively nice
Speaker 1: smelling soaps and lotions that I totally dig. But I've
Speaker 1: also noticed other smells that aren't exactly nice, but that
Speaker 1: I do find comforting and relaxing, like the musty smell
Speaker 1: of old books or the scent of my favorite beach
Speaker 1: at low tide. What was behind my preference for these
Speaker 1: kind of weird smells. I really wanted to better understand
Speaker 1: this complicated intersection between smell and happiness a bit better,
Speaker 1: so I reached out to someone who also has a
Speaker 1: thing for odd odors.
Speaker 3: I know you're talking about the sense of skunk, my
Speaker 3: dirty secret pleasure.
Speaker 1: This is smell expert Rachel Hers.
Speaker 3: Which actually, since I have come out of the closet,
Speaker 3: many people come and confess to me that they also
Speaker 3: really like the smell of skunk, so I am not alone.
Speaker 1: Rachel's a neuroscientist who's been studying our sense of smell
Speaker 1: for over thirty years. She's written books like The Scent
Speaker 1: of Desire about why smell is so enigmatic and That's Disgusting,
Speaker 1: a book exploring all things that turn our stomachs for
Speaker 1: most people, the stench of a skunk definitely falls into
Speaker 1: that second category. It's pretty awful. But Rachel's research has
Speaker 1: shown that our relationship with smell is so personal that
Speaker 1: even a scent evolved to drive us away can be
Speaker 1: oddly attractive, and for Rachel, the smell of a skunk
Speaker 1: only has positive associations.
Speaker 3: I do like the scent of skunk, and the reason
Speaker 3: for it is because the first time I ever smelled skunk,
Speaker 3: I was in the backseat of the car. It was
Speaker 3: probably maybe around four years old, It's hard to say exactly.
Speaker 3: Middle of the summer, windows roll down, driving through the countryside,
Speaker 3: beautiful day, and all all of a sudden, there's a
Speaker 3: scent wafting into the car, and from the front seat,
Speaker 3: my mom says, oh my, move that smell. Now, she
Speaker 3: doesn't actually name it, she just says, I love that smell.
Speaker 3: So here I am beautiful, happy, I love mommy. Mommy
Speaker 3: said something positive. So whatever that smell is, you know,
Speaker 3: I love that smell too. So fast forward about three
Speaker 3: or four years and I'm on the playground and all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, that same smell comes along and I go, oh,
Speaker 3: I love that smell, And people go ooh, grows, You're
Speaker 3: so weird. That's disgusting that skunk. And I did not
Speaker 3: know that that was a skunk first of all, and
Speaker 3: b that everyone thought like pepe lapew, whether it's really
Speaker 3: believe it's horrible or not, there's all this negative connotation
Speaker 3: around it. I was already perceived of as weird because
Speaker 3: I was a newcomer to the school, so this really
Speaker 3: sealed my fate as you know, someone who should be
Speaker 3: stayed away from. And this really also explains how our
Speaker 3: responses to all odors are actually based upon the meaning
Speaker 3: that we have learned to be associated with the odor,
Speaker 3: most times through personal experience. Could also be cultural. So
Speaker 3: for example, it could be the case that I had
Speaker 3: never smelt skunk before but just seen the Peppy la
Speaker 3: Pew cartoons, in which case I would have formed a
Speaker 3: negative association to that skunk smells bad. It is supposed
Speaker 3: to be bad, even without having ever smelled it. So
Speaker 3: we have this sort of interaction between our personal experience
Speaker 3: cultural significance of a scent. And one of the other
Speaker 3: things that's interesting too is that skunks are actually not
Speaker 3: native to Scandinavia and so they're not known there. And
Speaker 3: I had some friends from Sweden visiting me, actually all
Speaker 3: faction experts as well, and we were walking down the
Speaker 3: street near my house when I lived kind of in
Speaker 3: a country ish area, and it was in the summertime,
Speaker 3: and it just so happened, luckily enough for me, that
Speaker 3: that scent was, you know, on the breeze. So I
Speaker 3: turned to my colleagues and I said, have you ever
Speaker 3: smelled that before? And they go no, And I said,
Speaker 3: so what do you think of it? They oh, it's okay,
Speaker 3: it's interesting. It's like, well, what is that? So I
Speaker 3: said that skunk and then they were like, oh, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: what does that supposed to me? And then I said,
Speaker 3: everybody here thinks it's awful or there's a post that
Speaker 3: think is awful. And they're like, oh, you know, it
Speaker 3: doesn't have any good or bad necessarily to me. You know,
Speaker 3: could be nice. And our responses to smells are based
Speaker 3: on the meaning of the smell, but they're also based
Speaker 3: on how strong the scent is to us. So I
Speaker 3: have never been sprayed by a skunk. I've never had
Speaker 3: my dogs spray by a skunk, so I have to
Speaker 3: like live up close and personal with that scent. And
Speaker 3: my encounters have been, like I mentioned, on the breeze,
Speaker 3: just sort of at some kind of a distance. But
Speaker 3: this also speaks to the fact that my intensity perception
Speaker 3: of skunk is unique to me to a certain extent.
Speaker 3: So other people may at the same intensity of just
Speaker 3: on the breeze be perceiving certain chemicals in that bouquet
Speaker 3: is really intense, even though other people might consider it
Speaker 3: kind of moderate or weak. And if you think something
Speaker 3: smells really intense, it's going to be more negative. So
Speaker 3: there's also the genetics behind are all factory receptor expression,
Speaker 3: and everybody's actually ever so slightly different from everyone else.
Speaker 3: That is going to play into how strong something is,
Speaker 3: and the more strong something is anything, even like your
Speaker 3: favorite smell, if it's like super super pungent, they're gonna
Speaker 3: be like, oh, that's too much like perfume, for instance.
Speaker 1: And so I'm curious, given that negative experience on the playground,
Speaker 1: did that make you kind of anti smell? Did you
Speaker 1: like never want to think about that sensation because you
Speaker 1: seem like somebody in Lisa as an adult who's kind
Speaker 1: of into smell.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, absolutely, very very to smell. And I actually
Speaker 3: always was like I always was a really sensory person.
Speaker 3: Like my mother was always yelling at me stop squeezing
Speaker 3: the bread. I was always definitely smelling everything around me.
Speaker 3: But I actually thought that was normal.
Speaker 1: But in some ways, being really into smell is really
Speaker 1: not normal. In your book, you talk about how smell
Speaker 1: is this orphaned cousin of the senses.
Speaker 3: What do you mean there, Well, I think that there's
Speaker 3: a disconnect between being experientially or perceptually into smell. So
Speaker 3: there's definitely a lot of people that will only buy
Speaker 3: certain products because of how they smell, like they're unscrewing
Speaker 3: the cap of the shampoo in the drug store to
Speaker 3: make sure that they like it. Are other kinds of
Speaker 3: products like that that are definitely making a lot of
Speaker 3: simple life choices based on how something smells to them,
Speaker 3: and actually maybe even not so simple, maybe like your partner,
Speaker 3: other kinds of things like that. So I think people's
Speaker 3: actual experience with scent is much more deep and broad.
Speaker 3: But the discussion around scent and the verbalization and the
Speaker 3: recognition that this isn't just something trivial or just a
Speaker 3: little accessory to my existence, but actually something really fundamental
Speaker 3: to my existence. That's where the disc connect is, and
Speaker 3: that's where most people as well as most scientists for
Speaker 3: a long time, have really considered the sense of smell
Speaker 3: to be so marginal and to really speak to how
Speaker 3: much we disregard sent a couple of years ago, actually
Speaker 3: so in the height of the pandemic, we collected the
Speaker 3: data in the spring of twenty twenty one, developed a
Speaker 3: survey to look at first of all, how people value
Speaker 3: their sense of smell to hearing and vision, and then
Speaker 3: also in comparison to some basic commodities like your cell
Speaker 3: phone or a dream vacation or your hair, for instance.
Speaker 3: We had different kinds of things physical and then more
Speaker 3: sort of social and so on, and we found we
Speaker 3: had a large data set of subjects who were both
Speaker 3: a university level and also sort of real adults and
Speaker 3: the forty something group. And amongst the college students, twenty
Speaker 3: five percent of them would give up their sense of
Speaker 3: smell to keep their cell phone, and fifty percent of
Speaker 3: them would give up their sense of smell to keep
Speaker 3: their hair. The adults group was a little bit less,
Speaker 3: you know, throw it away, but they were pretty close,
Speaker 3: like there was someone like they were like, oh, we
Speaker 3: wouldn't do this at all. They were like maybe a
Speaker 3: few points less willing to give up their sense of
Speaker 3: smell for something else. But I was really quite stunned.
Speaker 3: And also because of the fact that although we didn't
Speaker 3: really have a good comparison, point like to do this
Speaker 3: in twenty eighteen and see the comparison. But I thought,
Speaker 3: because there was so much media about smell loss and
Speaker 3: about how people's story is about how awful it was
Speaker 3: they're even temporary smell loss and then long term smell loss,
Speaker 3: that there would be this sort of recognition, like this
Speaker 3: should be a high point of people saying, oh, my
Speaker 3: sense of smell is actually more important than I thought
Speaker 3: it was.
Speaker 1: And this kind of fits with what we see just
Speaker 1: in the world. I mean, we think of technologies right
Speaker 1: like I'm wearing contact lenses right now that improve my vision.
Speaker 1: We have hearing aids to improve people's hearing. We don't
Speaker 1: actually have any technologies that help us improve our smell.
Speaker 1: But that might be part and parcel of the fact
Speaker 1: that we just like don't see smells that important.
Speaker 3: Well, so two sides of that. One, you're absolutely right
Speaker 3: and up until now, and I hope that this is
Speaker 3: going to be changing soon. But the American Medical Association,
Speaker 3: for example, values smell loss is only between one and
Speaker 3: five percent of your life's worth. Value example, if you
Speaker 3: were in a compensation case, like you become blind or
Speaker 3: you lose another sense, how much should you be compensated
Speaker 3: for that? Well, vision you get eighty five percent of
Speaker 3: whatever your salary might be extended out for the next
Speaker 3: twenty years. Per smell you get anywhere between one and
Speaker 3: five percent. So really sort of idealize as hardly important
Speaker 3: at all. However, as a function of the pandemic and
Speaker 3: also new technology, new innovation, there's actually various things in
Speaker 3: the pipeline that are going to be available relatively soon.
Speaker 3: I hope that will in fact be things that can
Speaker 3: help people's sense of smell be augmented, so sort of
Speaker 3: the equivalent of a hearing aid for your nose.
Speaker 1: And that's going to be really important because what I
Speaker 1: learned from your book is that it really deeply affects
Speaker 1: us in our happiness when we lose a sense of smell.
Speaker 1: Give me a sense of what are the kinds of
Speaker 1: things that happen when we lose our old faction?
Speaker 3: So what is really shocking to people? And unfortunately, unless
Speaker 3: you've had the experience, you really just don't realize. I mean,
Speaker 3: multeple will say, oh yeah, well, food, I can see
Speaker 3: how that involved. Or maybe I couldn't smell the gas leaks,
Speaker 3: so there's certain like danger things that okay, I could
Speaker 3: understand that sort of more readily. But actually, our sense
Speaker 3: of smell is involved in pretty much everything about our life,
Speaker 3: in every way every day. So food, of course, because
Speaker 3: what most people don't realize is that the sense of
Speaker 3: taste is really only salt, sour, sweet, bitter and new mommy,
Speaker 3: but everything else we experience when we're eating. So bacon,
Speaker 3: for example, just taste like salt. The flavor is comprised
Speaker 3: of one hundred and fifty different volatile organic compounds that
Speaker 3: fuse together to make this bouquet of bacon. And people
Speaker 3: use the word taste. They really should be saying flavor.
Speaker 3: But all of that is to do with your nose.
Speaker 3: Food really does lose pretty much almost all of its
Speaker 3: hedonic pleasure qualities other than salt, sugar, and fat, and
Speaker 3: people get very upset, and depending upon their personality their
Speaker 3: previous relationship with food, it can become more and more serious.
Speaker 3: There's also all the aspects of one's personal life which
Speaker 3: we don't realize. I mean, our intimate relationships with other
Speaker 3: people we don't quite necessarily grasp. But you hug somebody,
Speaker 3: even if just like at a certain proximity, maybe they
Speaker 3: have a certain perfume or colone they usually wear. When
Speaker 3: you smell that, that's like kind of bringing you intensely
Speaker 3: together with that person. Your memories are based very much
Speaker 3: on things that you smell. People don't often realize that
Speaker 3: they've smelled something and it's making them feel nostalgic, or
Speaker 3: it's bringing them back to a specific moment in time,
Speaker 3: and all these things as it's going along, are actually
Speaker 3: triggering emotion. And this is because the area of the
Speaker 3: brain where our conscious perception of scent takes place is
Speaker 3: the same part of the brain where emotion, memory, and
Speaker 3: association is being formed. So the same brain areas doing
Speaker 3: these two things. So instantly that we smell something, we
Speaker 3: are getting some kind of feeling, some kind of visceral
Speaker 3: connection to that, and it can be negative. I mean,
Speaker 3: for example, PTSD can be triggered by scent, and often
Speaker 3: those episodes are amongst the worst because it's so visceral, overwhelming,
Speaker 3: because of the emotional intensity of it. But likewise, we
Speaker 3: can also get so much joy and direct connection to
Speaker 3: other people, to our past, to places through our sense
Speaker 3: of smell.
Speaker 1: So that's one big misconception about smell, this idea that
Speaker 1: we think it's like not that important, but in fact
Speaker 1: it matters for so many different aspects of our lives.
Speaker 1: I think the second misconception that we have about smell
Speaker 1: involves where our different smell associations come from. I think
Speaker 1: we assume that certain kinds of smells are kind of
Speaker 1: built in as bad, certain kinds of smells are built
Speaker 1: in as good. Is this really true or is this
Speaker 1: another spot where we get old faction wrong.
Speaker 3: Pretty much, there is no innate response to a scent
Speaker 3: per se, And what I want to do is sort
Speaker 3: of unpack a little bit of what is going on
Speaker 3: when we're smelling itself. So, when we're smelling, we're perceiving
Speaker 3: volatile chemicals, So that means chemicals that are floating through
Speaker 3: the air we inhale. Those chemicals come in through our nostrils.
Speaker 3: They then interact with the olfactory sensory neuron, which is
Speaker 3: are basically at the level of our eyeb But when
Speaker 3: we are smelling something. These chemicals can have a variety
Speaker 3: of different effects on another system as well, which is
Speaker 3: called the trigeminal system. It's a actually a tactile system
Speaker 3: where for instance, if you're chopping onions, it makes your
Speaker 3: eyes tier. If you're, you know, smelling mint, that cooling
Speaker 3: sensation comes from trigeminal The hotness of a hot pepper
Speaker 3: comes from trigeminal stimulation as well. So many smells also
Speaker 3: trigger the trigeminal system. If at the same time as
Speaker 3: smelling something, and the trigeminal system is activated very intensely,
Speaker 3: that can feel painful. That's pretty much the only quote
Speaker 3: unquote innate response we can have to a smell. If
Speaker 3: it's activating the trigeminal system as well as the olfactory system,
Speaker 3: and it's hurting, then it's going to be like immediately.
Speaker 3: No other than that, we are pretty much a blank slate. Now.
Speaker 3: It's kind of hard to imagine that because it seems
Speaker 3: as if you know, skunk is bad and roses good
Speaker 3: and everything else. But really places to look for this
Speaker 3: are number one newborns, although there's a little caveat there
Speaker 3: as well, because actually by three months of gestation time
Speaker 3: the fetus is already capable of detecting the chemicals in
Speaker 3: amniotic fluid that its mother is consuming, so we're already learning.
Speaker 3: And where this really plays into a major impact is
Speaker 3: where you know, food preferences come from. So you can
Speaker 3: have a baby that's born ready to sort of eat
Speaker 3: the food of that culture because of the fact that
Speaker 3: it's actually been already pre exposed to that food before
Speaker 3: it was born. But the idea that you know there's
Speaker 3: this sort of universal good, bad and otherwise is really
Speaker 3: based on experience. Because newborns, if they're given, for instance,
Speaker 3: vanilla versus something that smells like sweaty socks or vomit,
Speaker 3: if you look at their facial expressions, which is how
Speaker 3: you're going to judge if they're liking it or not,
Speaker 3: you see everything from grinning at smelly socks and vomit
Speaker 3: or making a discussed looking face to vanilla. And then
Speaker 3: you look a cross culturally and you also see huge
Speaker 3: variation in what is considered good or bad. And we
Speaker 3: really see this in a food. So like the idea
Speaker 3: of man's meat is and other men's poisoned there really
Speaker 3: comes from this massive effect of culture.
Speaker 1: One of the examples I loved was this interesting smell
Speaker 1: of winter green and looking at how it's perceived between
Speaker 1: Americans versus the British. Do you want to share that story?
Speaker 1: Because I found it so compelling.
Speaker 3: It's almost funny in a weird way, because, especially if
Speaker 3: you're an American and you're listening to this, you're like, well,
Speaker 3: of course winter green smells good. It's like it's a mint,
Speaker 3: it's a candy, it's paired with sugar. You know who
Speaker 3: doesn't like winter green? But it turns out that in
Speaker 3: the UK sort of like you know, if they give
Speaker 3: us the United Kingdom the US, two countries separated by
Speaker 3: a common language, what else is different between the two
Speaker 3: of us. Well, people in the UK generally can't stand
Speaker 3: the smell of winter green because their experience of it
Speaker 3: comes from the scent of this analgesic bomb, so medicine,
Speaker 3: and then nowadays actually winter green is also the scent
Speaker 3: of toilet cleaning products in the UK, so a medicine
Speaker 3: b toilets, I don't think so not eating that anyway,
Speaker 3: versus the US, where it's candy, and so really different
Speaker 3: association positive in one case, negative.
Speaker 1: In the other. So this explains why my friends from
Speaker 1: England often turn their noses up at perfectly good American candy.
Speaker 1: But could a brit learn to love winter green in
Speaker 1: the same way I do?
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: It turns out that we can train ourselves to love
Speaker 1: smells if we can link them to positive experiences, and
Speaker 1: we can even use these newly linked up scents to
Speaker 1: lift our spirits when we're feeling down. We'll hear more
Speaker 1: on all of that after a quick break in some
Speaker 1: of those all important ads. Neuroscientist Rachel Hers had to
Speaker 1: put up with lots of teasing when her schoolmates heard
Speaker 1: that she liked the smell of skunks, those animals that
Speaker 1: reminded her of happy summer car rides with her mom.
Speaker 1: The power of smell to take us right back to
Speaker 1: happy as well as sad moments from the past is
Speaker 1: almost unparalleled. A whiff of cologne can remind us of
Speaker 1: a long dead romance, while the smell of a sharpie
Speaker 1: can transport us back to college exam time. While there
Speaker 1: are some sense we'd happily ever smell again, Rachel suggests
Speaker 1: we try to identify the smells that prompt a positive
Speaker 1: reaction once we can turn to whenever we need a
Speaker 1: little happiness boost her go to Fragrance is from a
Speaker 1: childhood shampoo.
Speaker 3: We moved around a lot when I was a kid.
Speaker 3: My parents were professors. We lived in Europe, we lived
Speaker 3: in the US. We were bouncing around pretty much every
Speaker 3: ten months, sometimes every six months for the first, you know,
Speaker 3: six or seven years of my life. So at the
Speaker 3: age of seven, we land in Montreal, and it was
Speaker 3: it was tough with all that sort of moving around,
Speaker 3: especially when I first started school. I come in as
Speaker 3: the newcomer. I don't even last necessarily the full year.
Speaker 3: I'm yanked out. I go somewhere else. So, like I
Speaker 3: shared with the story of the skunk, you know, I'm
Speaker 3: a newcomer and I'm weird already, and now I'm proclaiming that,
Speaker 3: you know, skunk is one of my favorite smells. So
Speaker 3: definitely ostracized, did not have friends, felt really alone, felt
Speaker 3: really isolated, really desperately wanted social connection and so forth,
Speaker 3: and I was pretty unhappy, and you know, there was
Speaker 3: all kinds of things going on that very first year
Speaker 3: in Montreal. It was a terrible winter too, was like
Speaker 3: they had like crazy amounts of snowfall and really really cold,
Speaker 3: so that really also impacted even just going outside to
Speaker 3: play and so forth. And one day during these cold days,
Speaker 3: someone came, like a literally traveling salesman or door to
Speaker 3: door salesman with these packages of shampoo and conditioner and
Speaker 3: I think also maybe like the bubbly stuff to put
Speaker 3: in a bath. And he came to the door, and
Speaker 3: I remember I was at the door. My mom and
Speaker 3: I both nswered the door, and he had these bottles,
Speaker 3: and he you know, do you want to buy them?
Speaker 3: My Mom's probably like pretty much definitely know off the bat,
Speaker 3: and I'm like, wait a second, wait a second, can
Speaker 3: we smell them? Because no, why not? I like to
Speaker 3: smell And I think I could even already smell it
Speaker 3: before unscrewing it because it has a really intense set.
Speaker 3: And I was just unbelievably drawn to this smell and
Speaker 3: absolutely adored it. It was like happiness magic in a bottle.
Speaker 3: And I'm like, please, please, please, can you buy this?
Speaker 3: So she did and kept it in her bathroom, my
Speaker 3: parents bathroom, so that I wasn't using it all the time.
Speaker 3: And I think this also made a difference that it
Speaker 3: was kind of like special occasion use, like bubble bath
Speaker 3: or shampoo, and throughout that first year or two, when
Speaker 3: I would feel really unhappy, I would actually just go
Speaker 3: and smell it, and it would just immediately give me
Speaker 3: this feeling of calm and just the pleasure in and
Speaker 3: of itself of smelling. It was just phenomenal. And I
Speaker 3: would say that that smell was unique to me at
Speaker 3: the time. But it isn't like the smell from Mars.
Speaker 3: I mean, it is a scent that you will find
Speaker 3: in other products. It actually has a very piny aroma
Speaker 3: to it, which obviously I probably was familiar with with
Speaker 3: some other things. But just this particular mixture kind of
Speaker 3: captured a sort of a sweetness and other associations that
Speaker 3: somehow just were like sublime to me. So it emptied out,
Speaker 3: who knows when how many decades ago gone. I'm never
Speaker 3: going to smell it again. You know. This is a
Speaker 3: great sadness that I'm never going to, you know, be
Speaker 3: able to smell this. I did remember a couple of
Speaker 3: things about the bottle. One was that there was a
Speaker 3: horseshoe on it, and the other was that it was
Speaker 3: this deep kind of eveclimb blue. That was another aspect
Speaker 3: to the color was really intense and I thought that
Speaker 3: it was something like Alga Marine or something along those lines.
Speaker 3: You know, this was post the book you're talking about.
Speaker 3: So I talked, and actually when writing that book, afterwards,
Speaker 3: people would contact me and say, I think maybe you
Speaker 3: mean this, and none of them were right. Like they'd
Speaker 3: try to be helpful, like I maybe it's this shampoo
Speaker 3: that you were thinking of, this bubble bath, and like, no, no,
Speaker 3: that's not it. Anyway, fast forward to maybe and now
Speaker 3: maybe like eight or nine years ago, I'm not exactly
Speaker 3: sure what, but I was doing it documentary and I
Speaker 3: was being interviewed in a hotel room near Harvard Square,
Speaker 3: and I told this story and like this long lost
Speaker 3: love of this set that's gone. And then afterwards that
Speaker 3: we were going to do and they were going to
Speaker 3: be shooting some b roll and doing some other stuff,
Speaker 3: was to go to this kind of old fashioned drug
Speaker 3: store that has a little bit of everything. You know,
Speaker 3: it has old shampoos, it has perfumes, it hadn't had
Speaker 3: some floor to ceiling, all kinds of stuff. And I'm
Speaker 3: in this drug store walking around, you know, smelling things,
Speaker 3: looking at things, and all of a sudden I come
Speaker 3: to this one little spot on the shelf and I
Speaker 3: see this bottle that's that eveclind blue and it has
Speaker 3: the horseshoe on it, and I just like, oh my god,
Speaker 3: is this it? I pull it out. The person who
Speaker 3: owns the store is like, what are you doing. I'm
Speaker 3: opening up the package to sniff it, and it was it. Unsurprisingly,
Speaker 3: I bought four bottles the whole amount that was there,
Speaker 3: so and I don't even use it. I just go
Speaker 3: and I sniff it from time to time. So I
Speaker 3: think at the time I misremembered it being called aquamarine,
Speaker 3: but it's actually Alga marine. Here's the bottle. I'm going
Speaker 3: to open it up. I'm gonna give myself a little
Speaker 3: boost of happiness. So it's just this phenomenal I'm so
Speaker 3: I so love the smell. It's It's one of the
Speaker 3: things with smell is actually really hard to verbalize and describe.
Speaker 3: So even me, and even though you think I would
Speaker 3: have had a good way of describing the smell after
Speaker 3: loving it for so long, it's very difficult to describe.
Speaker 3: Maybe actually that's one of the reasons why I love
Speaker 3: the smell so much, because it's it's an odd combination.
Speaker 3: It definitely has sort of like a blue spruce note.
Speaker 3: It has what in the fragrance world is called marine
Speaker 3: sort of watery notes to it. It's kind of sweet,
Speaker 3: maybe it even has like some cinnamon, kind of like
Speaker 3: a spicy quality to it. But it's just this perfect
Speaker 3: blend of all of that to me. I mean, you
Speaker 3: might smell it and it could smell different to you.
Speaker 3: So this is also we're all unique. Not only do
Speaker 3: we have a unique body owner, we all have a
Speaker 3: unique nose. So it smells everything slightly different to everyone.
Speaker 3: But for me, this is the sort of spicy, sprucy
Speaker 3: vanilla e kind of wonderfully blue bottle of algebraine.
Speaker 1: This is kind of the beauty of smell is that
Speaker 1: it seems to get attached to particular context, but not
Speaker 1: just kind of any context. It seems to really get
Speaker 1: attached to emotional context. So talk about biologically why smell
Speaker 1: does that so well.
Speaker 3: Really, the physiology neuroanatomy of the sense of smell is emotion,
Speaker 3: and so from a even a neuroevolutionary perspective, the part
Speaker 3: of the brain that is now subdivided into the different
Speaker 3: structures of the limbic system, where we have the amygdala,
Speaker 3: which is actually very central to the processing of smell,
Speaker 3: as well as the hippocampus and other areas. That whole
Speaker 3: structure was not subdivided, and in fact just for detecting
Speaker 3: chemicals and smells are chemicals. So literally, our ability to
Speaker 3: perceive emotion I like to use came from our ability
Speaker 3: to detect chemicals to smell. And if you think about it,
Speaker 3: the function of the sense of smell and the function
Speaker 3: of emotion is very much the same. It's about what
Speaker 3: do I like, what gives me joy? What am I
Speaker 3: going to go towards, and what is bad for me?
Speaker 3: What do I want to stay away from? And essentially
Speaker 3: these mechanisms of survival. But as I mentioned before, the
Speaker 3: part of the brain where we are experiencing conscious perception
Speaker 3: of that's lemon, that skunk, that's caramel, and so on
Speaker 3: is the amygdala hippochemical complex of the olympic system. So
Speaker 3: the part of the brain that's actually processing emotion, associations
Speaker 3: and memory is doing two jobs. It's doing that and
Speaker 3: it is processing smell. So the primarial f cortex, like
Speaker 3: we talked about the primary visual cortex, primary auditory cortex,
Speaker 3: and so forth, the primarial factory cortex is the Amigdal
Speaker 3: hippocampical complex, and.
Speaker 1: Is that one of the reasons why smell can seem
Speaker 1: so fast. I feel like sometimes I'm like, say, walking
Speaker 1: down the street, and I'll have this moment where I'm
Speaker 1: thinking of, like the joy of Christmas. I get all
Speaker 1: these wonderful feelings, and then i realize like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: spelling pine or I'm walking by and I start thinking
Speaker 1: of my mom and I'm like, oh, that's lilax, which
Speaker 1: is one of her favorite flowers. Like, is that why
Speaker 1: the emotion seems to come so fast when we're experiencing
Speaker 1: these smell memories.
Speaker 3: So I would argue, and this is sort of a
Speaker 3: statement that's very hard to test, but I believe that
Speaker 3: smell elicits emotion first, and then we figure out, Oh
Speaker 3: it's Christmas. Oh it's my mother's perfume. Oh it's when
Speaker 3: I was at my aunt's house and I had this.
Speaker 3: The emotional aspect is first and foremost, because the brain
Speaker 3: is being activated emotionally when we smell. It's the two
Speaker 3: things aren't necessarily happening at once because it's the same
Speaker 3: part of the brain, So you can't experience smell basically
Speaker 3: without emotion. The emotion could be pretty bland. It could
Speaker 3: be pretty like, you know, h hum or. If the
Speaker 3: sense is really unfamiliar to you, it could even be
Speaker 3: like kind of cautious. I don't know what this is,
Speaker 3: so you know, I have to learn kind of the
Speaker 3: meaning of it and so forth. But it is impossible
Speaker 3: to sort of have a conscious perception of scent without
Speaker 3: some emotionality involved, because it's the same brain area that
Speaker 3: is doing both things. Sometimes we or maybe even a
Speaker 3: lot of the time, we have experiences with sense sort
Speaker 3: of fleeting lead that are kind of altering our mood
Speaker 3: and we're not exactly sure what they are. But what
Speaker 3: typically happens is we discount them. I mean. One of
Speaker 3: the things that's sort of unfortunate about the sense of smell,
Speaker 3: and I think one of the reasons why it's so
Speaker 3: ignored is because smells are invisible, and we are so
Speaker 3: visually oriented as a species that we're always like, what
Speaker 3: is that? Where is that? You know, point to this,
Speaker 3: point to that, and so forth. You know, for the
Speaker 3: data in the sense of our experience that when something
Speaker 3: isn't visible, or even when we don't know specifically what
Speaker 3: the source is. So, for instance, you could hear something,
Speaker 3: you'll know where is, you probably think most likely what
Speaker 3: it is. But smell can be such a black box
Speaker 3: in that way that if we don't know what something is,
Speaker 3: we often say we don't even smell it. So people
Speaker 3: can actually be presented with a smell that's, you know,
Speaker 3: high intensity, they've never smelled it before, and I say, so,
Speaker 3: can you smell something? People will say no, just because
Speaker 3: they don't know what it is.
Speaker 1: But that kind of means that that means that emotion
Speaker 1: is getting in kind of under the hood, right, that
Speaker 1: these the emotions that might be associated with smells can
Speaker 1: be really powerfully affecting us even though we don't even
Speaker 1: realize what the smell is.
Speaker 3: So what I would say is that that particular comment
Speaker 3: is if we don't know what the smell is, then
Speaker 3: it doesn't have a prior association emotionally to us, And
Speaker 3: if anything, it's going to elicit a little bit of
Speaker 3: a cautious like what is that? Let me take a
Speaker 3: step back, So better to play ignorant and go, oh, no, enough,
Speaker 3: nothing to smell here, rather than sort of have a
Speaker 3: commitment to it in some way or other. However, if
Speaker 3: it is a scent that we have prior experience with,
Speaker 3: even if it doesn't come to mind immediately what that is.
Speaker 3: So you could, for instance, be walking down the street
Speaker 3: and smell kind of floral send, not be able to
Speaker 3: pinpoint it and not be able to name it, and
Speaker 3: it suddenly makes you feel good because it just so
Speaker 3: happens it is your mother's favorite flower. But you wouldn't
Speaker 3: necessarily have realized that, but you still have that emotional connection,
Speaker 3: so it does get under the hood that way.
Speaker 1: The other thing that you've shown in some of your
Speaker 1: experimental work is that this kind of association can go
Speaker 1: the other way. You've really looked at the domains in
Speaker 1: which we build up these associations, even in kind of
Speaker 1: strange context like, for example, playing good or bad video games.
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit about this study.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, so we can engineer our own sense associations.
Speaker 3: However we want to do that, we can actually do
Speaker 3: it in a very positive way to sort of set
Speaker 3: up our own scent apothecary, Like I can get fragrances
Speaker 3: that I don't really know so I don't have past association,
Speaker 3: and get myself into specific mindful, positive mood states with
Speaker 3: different ones of them and create those positive connections so
Speaker 3: that then when I go back to that particular smell,
Speaker 3: it can get me like focused and relaxed or excited
Speaker 3: and invigorated, or whatever the case might be. But what
Speaker 3: we did in my lab was actually set up a
Speaker 3: sense of failure and frustration. And what we did is
Speaker 3: we've got a perfumer to make a fragrance. So it
Speaker 3: was actually not unpleasant. It was sort of like in
Speaker 3: the sort of neutral rating range, but it was unfamiliar
Speaker 3: and that was key because if a smell is already
Speaker 3: connected to something that you have in association too, it's
Speaker 3: very hard to reconnect it to something else. So whatever
Speaker 3: that first association is is the one that sticks, unless
Speaker 3: the subsequent one is really powerful emotionally. And this is
Speaker 3: why most of the time, when we smell something, it
Speaker 3: tends to remind us more from earlier points of time
Speaker 3: in our life, because that's the first time we probably
Speaker 3: encountered it. So like the first time you encounter whatever
Speaker 3: it is is going to be what sticks. That we
Speaker 3: experienced so much in childhood, that tends to be why
Speaker 3: we're taken back to child so often. What we did
Speaker 3: is we took this unusual chemical bouquet, and we had
Speaker 3: people play a really frustrating computer game that was rigged
Speaker 3: to make them lose money. Now it wasn't their money
Speaker 3: in the first place. We gave them two dollars and
Speaker 3: fifty cents. And these were brown students, so they're highly motivated.
Speaker 3: They want to get a plus on everything. So he said,
Speaker 3: depending upon how good you had nothing to do with skill,
Speaker 3: but how good you are, you can double your money
Speaker 3: in five minutes by playing this game, and you know,
Speaker 3: five dollars against a trivial amount. Losing two dollars and
Speaker 3: fifty cents, however, believe it or not, is really draumatizing.
Speaker 3: But also because the computer would make these noises like aunt,
Speaker 3: you know, you got it wrong, and it got them
Speaker 3: into a really negative mood state. So it's really easy,
Speaker 3: as I'm sure you well know from your research, to
Speaker 3: get people upset. Not very easy to get them beyond
Speaker 3: kind of a baseline level of average happiness, but to
Speaker 3: get them upset, it's really easy, and with highly motivated
Speaker 3: college students, probably the easiest of all, especially if you're
Speaker 3: telling them they're failing in something. So after this association
Speaker 3: that we set up with this unfamiliar scent. We then
Speaker 3: had them do another series of tasks with that scent
Speaker 3: in the room or a different set that was equally unfamiliar,
Speaker 3: so that perfumer came up with a couple of different
Speaker 3: fragrances or people were assigned these other tasks in a
Speaker 3: room that was uncented. And what we found on these
Speaker 3: series of subsequent tasks when that scent that was associated
Speaker 3: to frustration was also there, they did much worse on
Speaker 3: things that required persistence. So I'm going to stay with
Speaker 3: this and try harder. Basically, performance which is interestingly not
Speaker 3: the same as skill, so I can have an innate
Speaker 3: ability which is not being reflected by my performance. By performance,
Speaker 3: to be good has to be also motivated, like I
Speaker 3: have to want to succeed and achieve. So I could
Speaker 3: have the ability to do the test, but I don't
Speaker 3: want to do the test. And basically we saw that disconnect.
Speaker 3: We saw ability being maintained, but performance really modulating as
Speaker 3: a function of whether the scent was the one that
Speaker 3: was connected to failure or not.
Speaker 1: So incredible, but this is not the only domain in
Speaker 1: which smell can affect us. No discussion of emotion and
Speaker 1: smell would be complete without talking about smell and sex.
Speaker 1: As a person who doesn't know that much about alfaction,
Speaker 1: I really have the strong sense that smell matters a
Speaker 1: lot for attraction. What does the science actually tell us.
Speaker 3: So, yes, smell does matter a lot for attraction. It
Speaker 3: matters a lot for intimacy in general, because as I
Speaker 3: mentioned before, like if you go and you hug someone,
Speaker 3: you automatically get some of their smell. Like it's a
Speaker 3: very proximal intimate sense, So you can smell them, whether
Speaker 3: it's the body lotion, shampoo, cologne, natural body odor, maybe
Speaker 3: a combination of all of the above, and that gives
Speaker 3: you this sort of depth into that person. But above
Speaker 3: and beyond that, it's actually extremely important in the attraction
Speaker 3: that women in particular have towards an opposite sex partner.
Speaker 3: And this is in fact based on evolutionary theory. So
Speaker 3: there is also evidence that for homosexual relationship smell is
Speaker 3: also important, but it doesn't quite have the same navigation
Speaker 3: in terms of why in what we find specifically attractive
Speaker 3: in our romantic partner as it does in this sort
Speaker 3: of picture for heterosexuality, which is based on having children.
Speaker 3: So are propagation and based on the idea that we're
Speaker 3: all here just to replicate and get our genes out
Speaker 3: into future generation. And as a function of that, there's
Speaker 3: a different strategy that males and females would engage in
Speaker 3: for doing that most successfully. And so for females the
Speaker 3: cost is very, very high. You know, first of all,
Speaker 3: nine months of pregnancy, where not only are you much
Speaker 3: more vulnerable during those period that period of time you
Speaker 3: need more energy, you can't move around to the same extent,
Speaker 3: so you're in a definitely vulnerable state from your own
Speaker 3: self interest of survival. Then after the infant is born,
Speaker 3: you have at least one year where if you were
Speaker 3: to get pregnant, you would stop lactating so not be
Speaker 3: able to breastfeed. And this is you know, again kind
Speaker 3: of based on our evolutionary history. This is not based
Speaker 3: on having formula or anything else. But if you are
Speaker 3: not lactating and your infant is not able to eat
Speaker 3: solid food, then that infant can die. So you have
Speaker 3: basically two years where you're out of commission for all
Speaker 3: this energy and cost being spent on this one child
Speaker 3: who hopefully will survive and throw and then have children herself,
Speaker 3: and then go on and perpetuate your genes into subsequent generation.
Speaker 3: But the other piece of this story is that that
Speaker 3: child be healthy, and what determines your health will your
Speaker 3: immune system determines your health. And it turns out that
Speaker 3: the blueprint for your immune system, the genes for your
Speaker 3: immune system, is externally represented by your body odor. Everybody
Speaker 3: actually has a unique particular code for their immune system,
Speaker 3: and everyone has a unique body odor. It says unique
Speaker 3: as your fingerprint. This is how the tracking dog finds
Speaker 3: you when you leave your T shirt behind in the
Speaker 3: jail cell, and doesn't just go after any old random
Speaker 3: person because nobody actually smells identical to you, except if
Speaker 3: you had an identical twin eating the exact same food
Speaker 3: as you. But taking that particular qualification aside, you have
Speaker 3: your unique scent, and that unique scent is actually a
Speaker 3: representation of the genes of your immune system. Now, from
Speaker 3: a strategy perspective, the best strategy for a female is
Speaker 3: to mate with someone whose immune system is going to
Speaker 3: be complementary to her own, double up on any nasty, bad,
Speaker 3: recessive traits, and cover things that she doesn't have coverage for.
Speaker 3: So if I have coverage for diseases A through M
Speaker 3: I want to be with someone who has enter Z
Speaker 3: and that will ensure that the children I have with
Speaker 3: that person are going to be maximally healthy. So that
Speaker 3: actually seems to be part of what is going on
Speaker 3: with attraction to somebody's natural body odor. But it really
Speaker 3: turns out that it's not the case that we have
Speaker 3: this little biological switch in our brain or nose going
Speaker 3: you smell like you're genetically different in a good way,
Speaker 3: you know, let's have a baby, but rather that you
Speaker 3: don't smell like family, And it's basically like a scent
Speaker 3: incest avoidance Q. Because from the point of view of
Speaker 3: smelling like family, why that's a problem. We know that
Speaker 3: when people are too genetically related, then there are problems.
Speaker 3: First of all, there's even problems getting pregnant. Then if
Speaker 3: you do have a baby, there's a greater likelihood for
Speaker 3: recessive traits to be manifested, which can lead to, you know,
Speaker 3: terrible diseases that don't allow for thriving, surviving and having
Speaker 3: children yourself.
Speaker 1: I think there's two really cool things about that. One
Speaker 1: is that we have this learning mechanism that's so powerful
Speaker 1: that we're like detecting the smell of different immune genes
Speaker 1: by detecting whether or not somebody smells like our family
Speaker 1: member and avoiding people if they smell like that. But
Speaker 1: the other cool thing is that that suggests that we're
Speaker 1: all doing it differently, Like there's not one like awesome
Speaker 1: smelling guy out there. Every single one of us thinks
Speaker 1: is like really old, factor really hot. Yeah. Absolutely, It's
Speaker 1: kind of different for everybody, which is cool.
Speaker 3: Yes, So, as a female looking for my ideal scent
Speaker 3: match male, in terms of this whole being heterosexual reproduction,
Speaker 3: there's no brad pit of smells. There's going to be
Speaker 3: a different brad pit for every woman. So the idea
Speaker 3: that we're basically all have a different sort of beauty
Speaker 3: metric or sexiness metric for who the best match will
Speaker 3: be is based on the individuality of our own genetic makeup.
Speaker 3: The smell of family, though, can still be positive, but
Speaker 3: not in a sexual way. So the smell of family
Speaker 3: can be like really comforting, really cozy. I want to
Speaker 3: hug from this person, but that's different from I want
Speaker 3: to have sex with this person. So there is this
Speaker 3: difference between wanting someone sexually versus wanting someone emotionally, although
Speaker 3: they too can also become the same when we're in
Speaker 3: an intimate, long term relationship with someone.
Speaker 1: In case you were wondering, I googled bread pit, and
Speaker 1: at least according to actress Jennifer Lawrence, he smells like sandalwood,
Speaker 1: which may or may not be your thing. After the break,
Speaker 1: we'll look more atcent and memory and what you can
Speaker 1: do if disaster strikes and your sense of smell starts
Speaker 1: to fade. The Happiness lab will be right back. No
Speaker 1: sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched
Speaker 1: my palate than a shudder ran through me, and I
Speaker 1: stopped intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.
Speaker 1: This is one of the most famous lines and Marcel
Speaker 1: proosts in Search for Lost Time. The story's narrator has
Speaker 1: just dipped a Madeline cake into a cup of tea
Speaker 1: and taken a bite. The scent of that magical combination
Speaker 1: of tea and cake sends Prus's character right back to
Speaker 1: his fondest childhood memories. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses,
Speaker 1: the narrator says, and at once the vicissitudes of life
Speaker 1: had become indifferent to me. Its disasters, innocuous it's brevity illusory.
Speaker 1: This is perhaps the greatest ever description of how our
Speaker 1: senses can briefly transport us to a whole other plane
Speaker 1: of joyful existence. It's a passage that always intrigued Rachel Hers,
Speaker 1: even prompting the neuroscientist to carry out her own research
Speaker 1: on how smell and memory mix.
Speaker 3: So there's a couple of things that are going on
Speaker 3: in Prus's description of his Madeline Biscuit and lind and
Speaker 3: tea that I think are really profound and really speak
Speaker 3: to the experience of what happens when a scent evokes
Speaker 3: a memory. One of the things that's really brought out
Speaker 3: by his description is that the experience of emotion comes first.
Speaker 3: He's writing about how he feels when he takes this
Speaker 3: flavor can call in before he ever gets to and
Speaker 3: like literally pages before he gets to my aunt's house, Incumbra,
Speaker 3: this is what was happening, and so forth. So the primacy,
Speaker 3: the sort of phenomenological aspect of emotion first and then
Speaker 3: cognition after is really fleshed out in the way that
Speaker 3: he narrates that experience. But a couple of other things
Speaker 3: connected to that which I think are very important and interesting.
Speaker 3: So we have certain things that will remind us of
Speaker 3: particular past moments in our life, autobiographical memories. Now, in
Speaker 3: research that I've done and other people have subsequently replicated
Speaker 3: and so forth, I found that when we have a
Speaker 3: memory that's triggered by ascent, that memory is not necessarily
Speaker 3: more accurate or reliable like this is, you know, the truth,
Speaker 3: as it were, but it is definitely more emotional and evocative.
Speaker 3: We feel much more brought back to that original time
Speaker 3: and place, and that is because of the part of
Speaker 3: the brain that's processing emotion and memory is the same
Speaker 3: part of the brain that's processing our conscience perception of
Speaker 3: sent So we're getting that blast of emotion and real
Speaker 3: memory sort of like recapitulation at the same time as
Speaker 3: we're getting that conscious Now I'm smelling Madeleine and Linden tea,
Speaker 3: or now I'm smelling the bubble bath from when I
Speaker 3: was seven years old, or whatever the case might be.
Speaker 3: But the other thing that's really important here, and I
Speaker 3: think really special, is that we have millions and millions
Speaker 3: of different things that have happened to us in our life,
Speaker 3: and the older we are, the more they accrue. I
Speaker 3: don't know how many of them we remember, and there
Speaker 3: are many of them which we may never remember if
Speaker 3: it weren't for stumbling across a particular scent that brings
Speaker 3: you back to that particular time and place. So Proofs
Speaker 3: actually writes like he had totally forgotten about this episode
Speaker 3: with his aunt and Combra, and it wasn't until he
Speaker 3: came to have this sort of reconnection with this sort
Speaker 3: of unique blend of Linden tea and Madeleine cookie that
Speaker 3: he was brought back to that. And all kinds of
Speaker 3: things like that can happen to us throughout our lives,
Speaker 3: where we might never come across that same scent to
Speaker 3: bring us back to that same moment in time. And
Speaker 3: that's further complicated by the fact that our interpretation of
Speaker 3: a scent is due to the context that we're in
Speaker 3: when we're having the perceptual experience. So if Proofs weren't
Speaker 3: actually having a biscuit and a cup of tea sort
Speaker 3: of the same thing, but just somehow came across the
Speaker 3: aroma of Lindon matt Len merged together, maybe if he
Speaker 3: was like walking down the street in Paris, he could think, oh,
Speaker 3: that's the scent of somebody's perfume or whatever it was,
Speaker 3: and not be reminded of his aunt and his childhood
Speaker 3: because the context was so different. So we need a
Speaker 3: variety of things kind of overlay to bring the meaning
Speaker 3: to be the same, to then bring us back to
Speaker 3: that moment in our past which might otherwise be forever forgotten.
Speaker 3: So I think a way of really having a full
Speaker 3: life story is to be paying attention to cents throughout
Speaker 3: it so that it can bring you back if you
Speaker 3: have the opportunity.
Speaker 1: But it seems like this kind of recognition also gives
Speaker 1: us something we can do to make memories a little
Speaker 1: bit more emotional, which is that we can add a scent.
Speaker 1: So I'm thinking, you know, maybe I'm going on a
Speaker 1: new vacation that I really want to remember, or maybe
Speaker 1: it's my wedding day and I want to remember all
Speaker 1: the parts, like when I was getting dressed and what happened.
Speaker 1: The suggestion there that I never would have thought of
Speaker 1: before thinking about your research is that maybe if we
Speaker 1: bring in a particular smell, that'll make it easier later
Speaker 1: on to go back to exactly what we were feeling
Speaker 1: at those moments. Is that kind of what we see
Speaker 1: from the research.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and I do this. I actually create sort of
Speaker 3: my own personal set memories for particular important episodes. So
Speaker 3: if I'm going on a special vacation, I will go
Speaker 3: to a fragrance store and go through a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of different fragrances, like pick out one that's something that's unfamiliar.
Speaker 3: Obviously I have to like it too, and then for
Speaker 3: the period of that vacation, I wear that scent every day,
Speaker 3: and then I don't wear it after the vacation, and
Speaker 3: then when I want to be particularly reminded of it,
Speaker 3: I will smell it, or if I want to like
Speaker 3: kind of reconjure the particular experience, I will wear it
Speaker 3: for a night or whatever the case might be, and
Speaker 3: then I am really brought back because the set snapshot
Speaker 3: to that experience, which is much more than just a visual.
Speaker 3: It's so much more emotional now. One thing that I
Speaker 3: do have to caution people about is this problem of
Speaker 3: adaptation and habituation, where we stop being able to detect
Speaker 3: the scent if we over expose ourselves to it. So
Speaker 3: you know, if you think about if you wear a
Speaker 3: fragrance on a daily basis, or if you use the
Speaker 3: same kind of scented lotion or whatever the case might be.
Speaker 3: You may hardly smell that scent anymore, or you barely
Speaker 3: smell it at all. That's why it's really important to
Speaker 3: be very sort of judicious and use sort of tiny amounts,
Speaker 3: sort of cautious about overdoing it, of only wearing it
Speaker 3: for a short period of time. So if I went
Speaker 3: away for a month, it would not be advisable for
Speaker 3: me necessarily be wearing this every day if I want
Speaker 3: to get the full bandwidth of that experience, because over
Speaker 3: that month, I'm going to stop really being able to
Speaker 3: be sensitive to smelling that fragrance. And so maybe the
Speaker 3: beginning of the month long trip that's going to be
Speaker 3: highlighted for me, but the other parts that might fade out.
Speaker 3: So for a short period of time and not doing
Speaker 3: it overboard using a scent to create a memory and
Speaker 3: then being able to come back to it. But you
Speaker 3: also can't be like smelling that perfume every day afterwards
Speaker 3: to remember the trip, because then the genie will also
Speaker 3: leave the bottle.
Speaker 1: It seems like that kind of caveat also comes in
Speaker 1: when we start thinking about ways that we can use
Speaker 1: sense to feel better. Generally, you know, everybody's heard this
Speaker 1: term of romatherapy. Is this the kind of thing we
Speaker 1: can really use to feel better and improve our emotions
Speaker 1: in our daily life more generally?
Speaker 3: Yes, so absolutely so. I definitely recommend for people to
Speaker 3: find fragrances that they don't know from before, so not
Speaker 3: something you already have an association to, something that is
Speaker 3: unfamiliar to you, and then specifically pair that with getting
Speaker 3: into some kind of positive emotional state. And like I said,
Speaker 3: you can have a whole apothecary, like get eight or
Speaker 3: ten different fragrances and then get into particular emotional states
Speaker 3: and then smell those smells when you're in that state,
Speaker 3: and then when you want to get into that state,
Speaker 3: smell it again. So let's say I have a job
Speaker 3: interview that I'm really nervous about and I want to
Speaker 3: really do well, and I really want to feel confident
Speaker 3: and energized. Well I have that sense that I was
Speaker 3: using when I was in this really confident, energized state.
Speaker 3: I then smell it before my job interview and then
Speaker 3: I can go in and give them the best Or
Speaker 3: if I'm feeling really stressed out and there's another scent
Speaker 3: that I've connected to feeling relaxed and soothed and you know,
Speaker 3: chilling out and down vibes in a good way. Then
Speaker 3: I can go and ice and smell that. But the
Speaker 3: idea here is not to be doing it too much,
Speaker 3: Like you can't this can't be your like your daily
Speaker 3: drug of choice. You can't keep going back to it
Speaker 3: because the more you go back to it, the more
Speaker 3: two things happen. When you will adapt to it just
Speaker 3: not be able to smell it nearly as well, So
Speaker 3: the sensitivity to a decrease. But it's also the case
Speaker 3: like if you keep going back to the scent that
Speaker 3: makes you feel calm when you're in a frazzled state,
Speaker 3: over time that scent can also become connected to being frazzled,
Speaker 3: So it's sort of losing its benefit in that regard
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 1: I think another thing I find so weird about smell
Speaker 1: is that it's really hard to remember smells. Like I
Speaker 1: can image, you know, what my car looks like when
Speaker 1: I was a teenager, and I can kind of remember
Speaker 1: what that podcast sound like, you know that I listened
Speaker 1: to you last week, or remember what someone's voice sounds like,
Speaker 1: But it's really hard to remember, like a smell, like
Speaker 1: even very familiar smells like baking cookies. I've smelled that
Speaker 1: a bunch in my life, but when I try to
Speaker 1: image that in my brain, I like kind of can't.
Speaker 3: So it seems as though we don't actually have the
Speaker 3: capacity to in our brain's nose keep stored the sensory representation,
Speaker 3: so the percept itself, so we can know things about it,
Speaker 3: like baking cookies. We have all kinds of semantic information
Speaker 3: visual information about it and so on, and know that
Speaker 3: we really like it. But to really get that smell
Speaker 3: recapitulated at will, you know, just because I feel like
Speaker 3: it's this the way you can visualize your car or
Speaker 3: think about the song and really hear it, we don't
Speaker 3: seem to be able to do that with smell. Now,
Speaker 3: expert perfumers will argue with you that they can do it,
Speaker 3: and it is possible that they actually can, because one
Speaker 3: of the things that's really interesting about the sense of
Speaker 3: smell is the more experience we have with it, the
Speaker 3: greater of the neuroplasticity develops with it, so that people
Speaker 3: who spend their livelihood doing smelling can potentially be able
Speaker 3: to eventually store at least a certain amount of these
Speaker 3: representations to be able to call them up perceptually. It will,
Speaker 3: and it is the case that occasionally we will have
Speaker 3: dreams where we experience the perception of scent. Also know
Speaker 3: there's certain conditions like migraine or even epileptic seizures, which
Speaker 3: for certain individuals are preceded by smelling something that isn't
Speaker 3: actually there. But for the average person with just a
Speaker 3: daily life experience, who don't seem to be carrying around
Speaker 3: all these stored representations, we know what the smell means,
Speaker 3: we know the feeling that it elicits as soon as
Speaker 3: we encounter it. We don't walk around with sort of
Speaker 3: the archive of all sense perceptually in our head.
Speaker 1: You've also argued that we need to make sure that
Speaker 1: we're using our smell well, that we kind of need
Speaker 1: to get practiced up on it and take it a
Speaker 1: little bit more seriously. So what are ways that we
Speaker 1: can kind of exercise our smell a little bit more
Speaker 1: in our daily lives.
Speaker 3: So having a good sense of smell is actually critical
Speaker 3: for a huge aspect of this in our life, our
Speaker 3: mental health, our physical health, not just the things we've
Speaker 3: been talking about today like emotion and memory and connection
Speaker 3: to other people, but literally the functioning of our brain
Speaker 3: and our body. So people who have a healthy health
Speaker 3: sense of smell are actually more likely to live longer,
Speaker 3: they have better cognitive health, they have better mental health overall.
Speaker 3: So having a good sense of smell is actually really
Speaker 3: important for the quality of our life and the quantity
Speaker 3: of our life. So lifespan and health span are really
Speaker 3: connected to a good functioning sense of smell. And there's
Speaker 3: ways that at any point in life. And unfortunately, i
Speaker 3: like with our other senses, as we get older, our
Speaker 3: sense of smell tends to not be as strong and
Speaker 3: it's different for everybody, but throughout our life's actually really
Speaker 3: beneficial to be exercising our nose. And how to do
Speaker 3: this is just, you know, on the most simple, basic level,
Speaker 3: just consciously every day to make a point to sniff something,
Speaker 3: not just that like have it hit you, but literally,
Speaker 3: you know, open up their cabinet and sniff the peanut butter,
Speaker 3: or go and take that you know, shampoo cap off
Speaker 3: and like sniff it, or you know, find a couple
Speaker 3: of things like that. Now that's just the most simple
Speaker 3: thing to do or while you're walking your dog like
Speaker 3: I do. Like you walk by some flowers that smell nice,
Speaker 3: like stop and actually smell the roses. So beyond doing that,
Speaker 3: if you are actually struggling to get a stronger sense
Speaker 3: of smell, or if you've lost your sense of smell
Speaker 3: and want to do something to regain it, then you
Speaker 3: can do something more explicit called smell training, and that
Speaker 3: involves getting four smells that are actually in this case,
Speaker 3: we want familiar smells. We want smells we have a
Speaker 3: positive connection to from the past, and whether we can
Speaker 3: smell them now or not. What you want to do is,
Speaker 3: let's say one of them is peanut butter, so I
Speaker 3: think of peanut butter as well. I like the smell,
Speaker 3: but also after a workout is sort of like a
Speaker 3: go to scent. So I'm going to smell peanut butter.
Speaker 3: I'm going to open the jar, and I'm going to
Speaker 3: think about this is my post workout smell. Do it
Speaker 3: with another three others. So you want to have like
Speaker 3: four familiar smells. Do this at least two, if not three,
Speaker 3: times a day so you don't have to spend long
Speaker 3: with it. It does take a couple of minutes each time,
Speaker 3: but that's not that much of a time commitment, and
Speaker 3: over time, what you will see is that overall your
Speaker 3: sense of smell should improve. Now, for people who've really
Speaker 3: lost your sense of smell and they're doing this, one
Speaker 3: of the difficulties is the frustration that this is not
Speaker 3: an instantaneous like I did it for a week and
Speaker 3: now I can smell again. And often it can take
Speaker 3: quite a bit of time. It might not work at all,
Speaker 3: but basically, you know, give it three months if nothing
Speaker 3: is happening, switched to another set of four familiar smells
Speaker 3: that you like, and keep on trying. And depending upon
Speaker 3: why you have smell loss, it can actually be the
Speaker 3: case that this will really help regenerate it. Now. It's
Speaker 3: not an absolute and it depends on how long it's
Speaker 3: been since you've lost your sense of smell, how you
Speaker 3: lost your sense of smell. This is more likely to
Speaker 3: be effective in things like post viral smell lost like
Speaker 3: with COVID, than it is if you had traumatic brain injury,
Speaker 3: like you were in some kind of an accident and
Speaker 3: you lost your sense of smell that way, that can
Speaker 3: be more difficult to regain. And it's also best if
Speaker 3: this is within the first year of having lost it,
Speaker 3: rather than you start this ten years later. But in
Speaker 3: any case, no matter what, this is making your brain stronger.
Speaker 3: So even if you can't smell it, the act of
Speaker 3: active sniffing, paired with thinking about what that should be,
Speaker 3: is actually going to be good for your brain overall
Speaker 3: and good for your cognitive health.
Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed this quick journey and to smell
Speaker 1: with my guest Rachel Hers, and particularly her description of
Speaker 1: scent and attraction. It nicely sets us up for our
Speaker 1: next season of shows, because this Valentine's Day we'll be
Speaker 1: looking at happiness and love.
Speaker 3: Oh I think on our second date, John said, you know,
Speaker 3: I was in another relationship, but I've told her I'm
Speaker 3: not going to see her anymore. And I immediately had
Speaker 3: a pianic tab. It was like, really already
Speaker 1: So make a date and listen again to the Happiness
Speaker 1: Lab with me, Doctor Laurie Santos