Jonas Olofsson
speaker
49 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Jonas Olofsson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Those people who lose their sense of smell often report that their love lives suffer, so they don't feel as connected to their partner. And oftentimes they might not be aware that it's the sense of smell that brought about this close emotional tie between them.
So this has been debated and for a long time, many people assumed that the human sense of smell was atrophied or underdeveloped. But recently, there have been efforts to try to combine everything that we know about how faint smells can humans detect. versus non-human animals, and then compare the two.
But as far as we know, humans are only outclassed by the dog in terms of how many molecules we can detect at a very low concentration. So only the dog is clearly superior to us. And so it's unfortunate to us that we interact with dogs a lot, so we compare our noses to theirs. They are perhaps the outlier, whereas we have a very strong sense of smell, better than most animals that we have studied.
So the sense of smell is much better than people typically give it credit for.
Yeah, so odors are basically molecules that are released from a type of surface and they are airborne. So they have to be of a certain molecular weight in order to be carried by the air. They can't be too heavy. But they are carried in the air and they are part of the air that we are sniffing and inhaling when we breathe in through our nose.
So on the top of the nasal cavity we have millions of little nervous cells so that the nervous system is actually exposed in the nasal cavity and there these molecules interact directly with the sensors on the nerve cells and the nerve cells
communicate they send an electric signal through little holes at the roof of the the nasal cavity and the base of the skull actually has little perforations and those those little holes that's where the neurons travel up to the brain and from there all kinds of weird and exciting things happen when the brain is supposed to tease apart very complex signals that are
coming from the nose so that we are able to to tell apart different smells to remember them to have an emotional reaction to them all these things take place in the the central parts of our brain one of the things i think people wonder about the sense of smell is that we smell things
Yeah, so it's believed that the most fundamental function that the sense of smell has is for us to detect chemical hazards or nutritious and pleasurable food sources at a distance. So we can navigate away from certain things and towards other things, and that helps us to survive. This is found in very simple organisms. It's called chemotaxis.
That's when a little amoeba swims towards sucrose, if you put it in a little dish. So it's a very basic kind of attraction and revulsion mechanism. And that helps the organism to survive. So I think that's kind of built into our brains and our genetics. But then...
What we have as mammals, we have a great capacity to learn, to learn to associate which are the smells that made us sick, which are the smells that turned out to be really nutritious and good food. And then we carry those memories with us. And when we smell something, our emotional reactions are to a large extent shaped by those prior experiences and emotional reactions that we had before.
Yeah, so a prior experience is one thing, but the individual receptor genetics, so those are the genes that are expressed in us as individuals that create those receptor cells that enable us to pick up certain molecules, those differ to a large extent from person to person, and that can have consequences for how strongly do we pick up on certain notes.
so for example someone's body odor might smell very strong and unpleasant to one person whereas for a different person it's it's okay or even even very nice but there was one interesting study in iceland so they have this local tradition of of eating fermented shark which smells very stinky to most people but those who perceive
this smell to be less strong, they might be able to sort of overcome this smell in order to eat food that might keep them alive. And so a particular version of this gene that makes this smell less strong is overrepresented in the Icelandic population, which has been heavily dependent on a fish diet. So I find that absolutely fascinating.
There are odors that are on a cultural level, that are disliked by all different cultures. But within those cultures, there are people who find these odors okay. So within each culture, there are individuals who have a completely different opinion about the smells. So it goes to show that... The sense of smell is very individual.
There might be general trends that are common across cultures, but within each culture, there are certain people who might just have, for biological or historical reasons, they might have a very different opinion of certain smells that other people find repulsing.
There is actually one of the first studies that I did was on pregnant women and their sense of smell. And one of the odors that we exposed them to was Chanel No. 5, the perfume. And... Most of the women in the sample, they strongly disliked this smell. I thought that they would really like it. It's an old perfume, but they really disliked this odor.
So it's really unpredictable what people will like and dislike. It's quite fascinating how different people react.
Yeah, they thought it was kind of overwhelming and too sweet and flowery and artificial, all these things that they... But I suppose other people might have a completely different view. Otherwise, the perfume wouldn't have been so popular. So it really has a lot to do with, I think, cultural values, experiences, these personal tastes that we develop over our lives.
But because the emotional qualities of smell... are so strong that makes us think that they must be innate. That's what I think is going on. Because we have this strong emotional kind of dimension to smells, we tend to believe that it cannot be learned. But when you expose people to smells, you see that the more they are exposed to it, the less unpleasant these odors tend to be.
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