Dr. Bob Datta
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 1 May
Dr. Bob Datta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So one possibility is that maybe odor qualities are organized in space in your nose.
So you might imagine that citrus fruits are all at the top and maybe meat is at the bottom.
Or maybe...
you know, these receptors are organized based upon what you like.
Maybe smells that are really pleasurable to you are at the top, and maybe smells that you really hate are at the bottom.
We don't know, but a major program of research in the lab now is trying to figure out what this map we've discovered actually means.
Absolutely.
So odors are actually small chemicals that flow through the air, and each odor smells different because it has a different structure.
And so one thing we did look at in our paper was whether or not
different aspects of odor chemistry, like whether an odor contains a ketone functional group or an aldehyde functional group, whether different aspects of chemistry are actually organized in the nose.
And what we found is that they're organized a little bit, but not a lot.
And so we wonder whether there's something else going on, and that's what we're working on now.
Sometimes, but not always.
So this is like a major problem in olfactory science.
If you look at a molecule, what makes it smell the way it does
And recent advances in artificial intelligence have improved our ability to predict what a molecule is going to smell like.
And what we've learned from that is that sometimes certain chemical features make things pleasant, but often those very same chemical features can be found in an odor that's unpleasant.
So that's a problem we're still working on.
We hope so.
So we don't know definitively whether this smell map exists in humans.
Showing 61–80 of 91 · page 4 of 5
← Previous
Next →