Christina Kim
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Christina Kim’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
She ran experiment after experiment using rats, an animal whose sense of smell works similarly to humans. She studied their genetic code relentlessly. This went on for years. And then, one day.
Linda and Richard Axel solved the puzzle. They'd found 1,000 smell receptors. It was just absolutely thrilling. Over the next decade, Linda Buck, Richard Axel, and their collaborators continued to build out how our brains perceive smell. Which then led to them winning the Nobel Prize in 2004. Rachel Herz says the Nobel Prize made Linda Buck into a rock star in the science world.
Suddenly, everyone was paying attention.
The thing that surprised me the most about all of this was we, as in humanity, knew very little about this sense that I was now learning to live without. Like the smell of onions sizzling, rain on warm concrete, or my yaya's perfume. How does that go from out there in the world, into my nose, up into my brain, and become a fundamental part of my memories, emotions, my story?
Well, after Linda Buck's discovery, we have a better understanding of how we smell, what we smell.
Air, what we breathe in every moment, is made of chemicals like nitrogen, oxygen, helium, that we can't actually smell, so...
Today, we know that humans can detect around a trillion scents. This number dwarfs the amount of tones we can hear, about 340,000. Or shades of color we can see, around 1 million.
This is because smell was extremely important for our prehistoric ancestors who lived in an inhospitable world. A world where they needed to be able to smell predators or prey from long distances away. A world where their instincts were driven by the smells they encountered on a daily basis. And the accuracy of those instincts were often the difference between life and death.
And with each breath, we are carrying in the odors in the air.
The odor molecules move up and up, lightning fast.
The genes responsible for those receptors are what Linda Buck discovered in 1991. They detect the chemicals, then start communicating with other neurons that will carry that information to a part of the brain that processes scent. And that's the amygdala hippocampal complex.
This also happens to be the part of the brain where our emotions and memories are processed.
So after Rachel patiently explained to me exactly how smell worked, I had one obvious question. How do I get it back?
I know what you might be thinking. Same thing I was thinking when she said it. Smell training? Really? Well, Rachel walked me through it.
Let's actually try it together, like us. Go ahead and grab something to smell. Ready?
Okay, I'm using peanut butter because I love that smell. So open the jar and breathe it.
According to Rachel, studies have shown this should help smell reemerge.
But Rachel says this is something anyone can and should do, even if they haven't lost their sense of smell.
Smell is a deeply personal thing. It's a conduit for our deepest memories and thoughts. But it isn't just about what's happening in our minds. Smell has played an important role in shaping our society, in deciding who does and does not belong. Coming up, how one of the most infamous legal cases in U.S. history came down to a scent.
To smell is to learn. Sense of smell allows animals, including skunks, to detect danger and navigate their environments. We humans also use our nose to discern dangers, like the smell of a gas leak or a fire. But we've also ascribed emotions and perceptions to certain smells, associating them with feelings like fear, delight, or something putrid. And those associations aren't natural.
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