Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The science of taste and smell (with Steven Munger)

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

Daniel and Kelly talk to Dr. Steven Munger about phantom smells, stinky shirts, careers as a "nose", and more. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All right, so I have a followed question there. First of all, am I correct in interpreting your answer is saying that bitter tastes are learned tastes and therefore more sophisticated and therefore we have scientific evidence that dark chocolate is better than white chocolate, for example? That may be a stretch. I'm taking that as a yes, and we're moving on. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I remember the first time I smelled California. Hi, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I'm a parasitologist, and I remember the first time I felt the wind on my feet

as I put on my sandals when I got to California for my Ph.D. interview, and I remember thinking, I'm never going to leave here because it was snowy and cold and miserable in Ohio, and I just loved that I could wear my chakos. But I did end up leaving, but I don't remember the smell. What was the smell of California? And now I'm worried the smell is wind from other people's feet. Well, that doesn't sound very nice. No wonder so many people's. people are leaving California. No, I used to visit my grandfather in Los Angeles when I was a kid, and I remember walking out of the airplane into Los Angeles and smelling it. And in my memory,

it's got sort of floral notes to it and a little bit of sea salt or a little bit of something from the ocean because I learned in this interview, you can't actually smell salt. But there's definitely something about California. And when I returned later to interview for a job, I remember getting off the airplane this time in Orange County and having that same scent memory, transporting me back to my childhood in those summers in Los Angeles and being like, hey, this could be a place I live. I like it here. Yeah.

I remember when we lived in Santa Barbara, I did love the smell of Santa Barbara, but I think that's mostly the smell of the ocean. And what is the smell of the ocean? What are we smelling in the ocean? Is it fish? Is it algae? Is it fish poop? What's going on there?

It's probably algae diatoms. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I don't want to know. Maybe I enjoy it more or not knowing. what is your favorite scent my favorite scent that's a great question i'm not sure what my favorite is but up there is the smell of onions and garlic in olive oil that's good you know when you start cooking something delicious and that smell it too i'm like mm sometimes i feel like they should make a perfume you know because if i wanted a date with a lady and she smelled like onions

and garlic and olive oil i'd be like yum married in a very wholesome way right right here's the ring. Yeah. That is a good smell. Zach always laughs because whenever he cooks, I come in and go, oh, it smells great. He's like, every time you say it smells great, it's the same thing. And I'm like, well, I'm consistent. It just still smells great. I love it. And so what are your favorite smells, Kelly? I love the smell right after a rain. And I think that has something to do with bacteria and some other stuff. I don't need to know. It just smells great. And then I love the smell of rosemary. One of the things that I loved about the place that I lived in Davis, California is that there was a rosemary bush and every day before I'd go to school I'd pull a bit off and snap it and

smell it before I went out and then lavender and eucalyptus those are very relaxing smells for me we have a whole hillside that's been colonized by a rosemary bush and when the sun hits it in the afternoon and that wafts over it's like overpoweringly amazing oh that's fantastic life is really good sometimes life smells amazing sometimes it does it didn't in grad school when I was jumping into dump trucks full of dead fish but there have been plenty of good smelling parts of my life, and I'm in one of them now, which is great. I'm very glad your life doesn't stink. Thanks.

Yeah, I'm glad your life doesn't stink either. Yeah, so on today's show, we have my friend Steve Munger. He is an expert on smell and taste, and I have asked him all sorts of stupid questions in the like five plus years that I've known him, and I am super excited to do that again today. So let's go ahead and bring Steve on the show. In today's show, we have Dr. Stephen Munger. professor and co-director of the Center for Smell and Taste Disorders at the University of Virginia. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much. Really enjoy the invitation. I'm excited that I get

the chance to chat with you again. We've interacted a couple times about all sorts of weird smell and taste topics, and I'm excited to bring to our listeners your sort of weird knowledge on smell and taste. Weird and wonderful. Thanks. Yeah, there's one of those instances back in the day when Twitter was a lot more about finding each other and getting interesting information. It's a good result. Yes, yes. Back when I used Twitter, we met Steve. We had a question for him for our book soonish, and we've been in touch since. So Steve, you've got to ask, do your family and your kids describe your work as a professor of everything stinky and delicious? No, they don't, or at least they haven't until this point, but I always love getting the chance to ask you about smell and taste stuff. And let's start with sort of a very basic question. How well do we understand smell and taste? Like, do we understand it microscopically? We do. I would say we're still a bit behind vision and hearing as far as our understanding of a lot of the basic biology of it. But it's come a long way, especially in the last 30 years. We know which cells in the nose, which cells in the tongue detect odors and taste.

We have a good sense of everything from the protein receptors on their surfaces to the way they connect to the brain and start to organize signals so that we can actually make sense of our detection. of all those chemicals that are in our food or in our environment, but it's still a lot left to be worked out, particularly in the way that one distinguishes different types of odors or taste, or conversely, puts them together because, of course, you don't really encounter single odor molecules, which we call odorants or single taste molecules, except, you know, if you said there any cotton candy, you're getting pretty much pure sugar. But usually you're encountering them as mixtures.

A flower has hundreds of different compounds that you're smelling it at the time. Foods have taste and odors that your brain is trying to put those signals together. So how we pull apart the different components and then put them back together so our brain can make sense of them and we can then react in an appropriate way, there's still a lot of questions in those areas. And so for vision, we have something of a cartoon understanding, at least I do, of how this work. you know, photons hit these proteins in your eye, they get absorbed, they flip some switch, they send a signal of your optic nerve, your brain gives you an experience of a color. Do we have an analogous picture for smell and taste?

Can you walk us through microscopically? What happens from when that cotton candy molecule hits your nose or your tongue? What's going on? Of course, it depends a little bit on whether you're talking about vertebrates or invertebrates. There are amazing amounts of similarities in the organization, but a lot of the molecular players are quite different. Do invertebrates like cotton candy? Most insects and others like sugars that are attracted to at least certain types of sugars

and they will avoid compounds that we perceive of as bitter. But how they do that can be a little bit varied. If we think of smell, what we're working with are millions of cells in our case and sort of the roof of the nasal cavity. These are neurons, nerve cells, that have one end projecting out into. the environment, basically within a mucus layer within your nasal cavity. So when you sniff something or when odors come back from your throat while you're eating and get up into that nasal cavity, they bind with receptor molecules that fit into the family known as G-protein-coupled

receptors. So these are ones that recognize the odor molecule and then initiate a biochemical cascade within the cell that changes the electrical activity of that cell. Those nerve cells then send messages back through the skull to the brain where they interact with nerve cells of the brain and create this process. So folks like me who are not adeptic chemistry, I want to understand what you mean when you say recognize those molecules. Like I'm imagining some molecule sticking up above the mucus and another molecule comes along and if they have the right sort of shape and electrons in the right places, they

can bind together? Is that what's happening? Like they're interacting chemically? Exactly. So we call a docking or binding where the odor molecule actually fits within a pocket that is formed by the protein strands of the receptor and causes a conformational change. The receptor protein changes its shape, which allows it basically to flip a switch inside the cell that's working across the membrane to initiate this cascade. And then one interesting thing about how we perceive odor is there's not a particular receptor. just for this molecule and just for that molecule.

In humans, we have about 400 of these receptors. In rodents, it could be 1,500, depending on the species. But even with those numbers, you can imagine that would be a pretty limited repertoire of chemicals you could detect if it was really that one-to-one thing. What it turns out to be is that each receptor generally can recognize a number of different molecules. Oftentimes, they may even be chemically distinct in their structure.

And each individual odorant molecule can bind to multiple receptors. And so what you're getting is really a pattern of activation. The molecule A may turn on receptors 1, 5, and 6. Molecule B may turn on receptors 3, 5, and 6, and that because of the way those receptors and the cells that express them are connected to the brain gives you different patterns of activation that you then learn to associate with molecule A or molecule B.

So let me see if I'm understanding. The picture I was imagining before was something sort of like a locking key mechanism where the dog poop molecule floats up and connects with something in my nose and is able to connect in and activate that. And as you say, actually change the shape of that

which triggers some signal down the brain. But now you're telling me that there are lots of different keys that can turn that lock, and that one key also can turn multiple locks, so that everything in our environment can turn on several signals, and that each signal can actually be turned on by several different kinds of things. So dog poop and cap poop might turn on the same signal, but they also might turn on a different combination of signals. Absolutely. You got it. Yeah. So, you know, when I look around my room, there's lots of different wavelengths, lots of different colors hitting my

eye, is smell more complicated than vision? And does the brain process it in different ways? I don't know if I'd say it's more complicated, but it is a little different, particularly because there's a bit of a learning aspect. You're not born knowing what the utterance of pizza is. You smell the pizza and your brain, a certain number of receptors are activated by those odor molecules that come from the pizza you're sniffing. And you learn that that pattern of activity means pizza, while another one that may have some but not all of the molecules in common means rotting fish. And, you know, you do it in my thing, because there can be overlaps.

Especially if you're a baby in Iceland and they like rotting fish pizza, right? My Ph.D. involved a lot of rotting fish. Oh, yeah. Just in Iceland this summer for a conference, we just thought, I did not eat in any of the rotting fish. I'd avoid it, too. Beautiful country, beautiful country. You wonderful people. Oh, it was stunning, stunning. So, Steve, you know that there's a common, like, philosophy question, which is also a staple in dorm rooms at 3 a.m., which is, like, when I see red, do you see the same red? How do we know? And what you just said suggests a similar question about pizza. Like, when I'm smelling pizza, is somebody else experiencing the same thing?

And my understanding is that the qualia of seeing red or the quality of experiencing that signal from your nose is something we don't have a great philosophical handle on. We don't know how to compare. We can't experience somebody else's internal, subjective experience. Is there an equivalent question for a smell? You know, is there this sort of Mary in the Red Room philosophical study about smell and taste? I think from a practical point of view, you can say, indeed, people have different perceptions of the same odor mixture. And one of the classic ones is cilantro. Some of you might really like cilantro and like sort of that green grassiness of the brightness of it that it can add to foods.

And others might hit and say, nope, that's soapy. That ends up being, most likely, a genetic difference in one particular odorant receptor that seems to be changed in its responsiveness to those soapy odor components. People who get the grassiness as the primary bit versus get the soapiness as the primary odor component are differing in the ability of their odor receptors in their nose to respond to that array of chemicals. So the chemicals are the same, but the way someone's perceiving it, and of course the way that impacts their interest in ingesting, that changes quite a bit. There are also a variety of other genetic variants we call specific anosmias. and these are ones where you may have a mutated odor receptor that is the primary receptor for

particular compound and you just can't smell it and someone else can. So endosterone, which is a pig pheromone from male pigs, but they're related chemicals in it. They're using cleaning products and other things is a classic of that. There are a lot of people, myself included, you could put a big bat in front of my nose. I have no ideas there. And there are other people like my wife who get even remotely close to it. And, oh, my God, that's awful. And there are those types of genetic differences. We did a thing with a bunch of winemakers recently and spiked identical wines,

one unspiked one with another compound called rotundone, which is a black peppery odorant. And there were maybe 20% of the people in that room that could not actually tell the differences between the line, even though, in that case, I could, and it was quite pronounced pepperyness. From that respect, there are differences. Now, it is a little different than what you brought up with the, are we seeing the same red wavelength, getting the same perception of what red is. Although, if I recall, there is a fairly common mutation in the green cone opson

that actually shifts the wavelength response a little bit in that. And so in that case, you can imagine two people seeing slightly different shades of green but still say no that's the grass song and so as somebody who is director of a center on smell disorders would you categorize somebody who can't appreciate cilantro as having a variant or like an issue like a disorder i mean this is something we need to treat all these folks out are like missing out on one of the joys of life a colleague of mine duron lancet once made the statement no one is norm osmic we all differs out that there are 400 potentially active odorant receptor genes in the human, and all of us probably have one or two

or maybe more that are mutated in such a way that that changes the way that we respond to the molecules that those receptors would normally respond to. So we're all seeing something a little different, and I do think that that is distinct from people who have a smell or taste loss or distortions or phantoms that disrupt their ability. ability to really more globally interact with food, interact with each other, perceive the world around them, or have sort of underlying long-term off tastes or fecal smells or other things that their brain is instructing. Those are the ones where I put them into the category of disorders as opposed to we have blondes and brunettes and blue eyes and brown eyes and that's more

of what I put as specific an osmium. So you mentioned wine. I enjoy wine, but when I read the descriptions on the back, I call bull-h-h-ha-ha-ha. When I read the back, I'm like, what percent of people who drink wine can taste all of the notes that are listed on the back? Am I in the minority or the majority of not being able to appreciate a complex flavor profile? I don't know if you are in the minority-majority.

I can't say that I am certainly hugely skilled as people that do that professionally. But part of it is also training. I mean, certainly a Somier or winemaker or brewmaster or whatever, generally going to have a pretty functional sense of smell and taste in order to be able to get most of the signals that they want to be able to perceive. But the ability to sort of pull out strawberry and lead pencil and black current and whatever others. Part of that is because there's been a standard design. of the naming of certain odor perceptions in the context of wine.

Beer has its own beer wheel, coffee has its own coffee wheel, so that when someone says lead pencil, they are describing pretty close to the same odorant molecules present there that someone else is. They're trying to make it a common language using more descriptive things rather than saying, I don't know, islamyl acetate or whatever other chemical name, you might want to come up with. The other thing that people are really skilled to do is they practice a lot.

This is attention to detail. This is memory. This is like learning a language. All those aspects go into it too that allow you to sort of focus on. So if you get someone who trains you that, okay, these six wines all have this flavor characteristic and those six ones do not, it becomes a lot easier to start to pick them out. And then once you've done that, it's easier to recognize. recognize it well. So I think it's more practice than anything. I need to switch jobs.

I think that probably also tells us something about the experience of these smells. You know, you're training somebody to recognize a certain responses. You're helping distinguish between black pepper and current and whatever. There must be a lot sort of in the neurobiology of smell behind, you know, the actual chemistry of the receptors as well. Yeah, which is an interesting in contrast with taste in some ways, and that taste is much more innate. You give babies sugar, they're going to smack their lips, and if they're old enough, they're going to smile, and they're going to want to eat more. You give them something as plain bitter compound.

They're going to scrunch up their face and put their tongue out and try to sort of spit it out, and they're born with that. I mean, we learn over time to give context to that. We learn that in some cases, bitterness is not definitely poison, if it's our French rose coffee or our IPA beer or Belgian endive or whatever it might be. We learn that we can appreciate that as part of a complex flavor profile in a safe way, but innately, bitter means spit it out and sweet means go ahead and ingest it. There's an energy source there. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

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my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious oh wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot he doesn't think it's a problem but i don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her

boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor

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I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your All right. All right. So here we have a question from a listener that actually inspired this whole episode. So let's go ahead and listen. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I had a question. Growing up and going into the woods, I was always told that if you put a plant in your mouth and it's bitter, spit it out because it's likely poisonous. As an adult, this raises questions in my mind. Why are poisonous plants bitter?

Did humans evolve the taste of bitterness exclusively to detect poisonous plants? But then you got the question of coffee is bitter, and we all know how that goes in the morning. But how bitter is too bitter to be poisonous because we know everything in moderation. And then there's the, did the Boy Scout leader just tell me this because he didn't want to see what all of us were trying to put in our mouth because we were stupid kids, but I have this question. I was hoping you could help me out and figure out why are we able to detect poison as bitter? Thank you very much. We think that the sense of bitterness has evolved in order to

avoid toxins. That seems to be common that compounds that we would perceive of as bitter are also aversive to a lot of other animals, even if they're not using the same protein molecules to detect them that mammals are. So that's very common, but obviously we can learn in context that bitterness may also be something that can be attractive if it's put together with other things that we like. Coffee is a good example. There are a lot of compounds in coffee, including caffeine that on their own are bitter, and you would not like them. No one would like them. Put them in the kinds of coffee, not only do you have the appealing aroma of coffee,

the pharmacologic buzz of the caffeine, the fact that you enjoy going to the coffee shop with your friends is a part of a ritual every morning, the fact that you don't see a bunch of dead people laying around that coffee shop, they've just been poisoned, all these things give you context that tells you that in that particular situation, the bitterness is positive, and a lot of people learn to like better. I like darker roasted coffees and I like highly hopped beers that it's appealing to me. But if I took those compounds of themselves out of that context, I wouldn't. So that's definitely the case. It's interesting that both for the receptors that respond to sweet and umami or savory taste, amino acid tastes, as well as to bitter tasting

compounds, they're not restricted to the taste cells of the mouth, the ones that actually lead to taste perceptions. They're found all over the body. Bitter receptors are in the gut, they're in the heart, they are in the thyroid gland, and there's a lot of question of are these proteins potentially responding to ingested toxins and then allowing for some sort of physiological protective response if you start to build up too much or could they be just repurposed in a way that allows the same protein to respond to endogenous signaling molecules within the body and also be used when it's connected up to the taste system to be used for detecting bitter tastes.

All right, so I have a follow-up question there. First of all, am I correct in interpreting your answer is saying that bitter tastes are learned tastes and therefore more sophisticated, and therefore we have scientific evidence that dark chocolate is better than white chocolate, for example? That may be a stretch. I'm taking that as a yes, and we're moving on.

My real question is a comment on the idea of having smell receptors in the gut and in the heart and other places in your body, as it relates to the experience of smell, is there a possibility that we are experiencing those flavors in our gut or in other parts of our body and it's contributing to our experience? Are we tasting inside our body?

That's a very common question. The answer is quite conclusively no. Oh, man. So I'll give you an example. So the sweet taste receptor. This is a protein, it's actually a protein complex called T1R2, T1R3, two members of the type one taste receptor

family. These in the mouth, they are responding not only to sugars, but to anything that you perceive of the sweet, it actually activates this protein complex. It has lots of different binding sites, different ways. So synthetic sweeteners like aspartame, so the blue packet, saccharine, the pink packet, sucralose, the yellow one, proteins that are found in a number of tropical berries and fruits that are highly potent, thousands of times more potent than sugar. Lead, one reason the kids eat lead paint is lead acetate taste sweet, and that activates that same receptor. So all of those compounds are giving you a perception of sweetness because they turn on that receptor. That same receptor is in your gut, and specifically in a population of cells called enter-endocrine L cells,

that are involved in glucose responses, allowing your metabolic systems to respond to the ingestion of a sugar load. So let's go back to cotton candy, you eat that cotton candy, the sugar goes through your digestive system down until your small intestine. Those glucose molecules now interact with the sweet taste receptor, the sitting on the inside surface of your intestine, that triggers a response that elicits amongst other things, a peptide hormone called GLUCUC-1, Glucigone-like peptide 1, which probably everybody now knows about because of Ozempic and Lagovi, which is basically mimics that peptide. And that pet pride can then act on the brain.

It can act on the pancreas to adjust the insulin release and satiety and things like that. So the receptor is mediating that physiological response in the gut. It's mediating the detection of taste in the mouth. But why is it not giving you taste in the gut? It's because the nerves that connect that part of the gut to the brain go to a different area than the nerves that connect the part of the tongue. So how you are detecting it is the same. It's the same lock in those two different places.

But the doors that they are in are very different. So Daniel and I, while asking you questions, have been alternating between saying smell and taste and we haven't been consistent, but those are different. How does our body respond to smell and taste differently? Or is it okay that we're being sort of loose with those terms? No, I think it's something we do want to distinguish.

And maybe it's good to briefly define them explicitly. So smell is going to be, at least in humans, the detection of volatile chemicals, whether coming through the naries of your nose, the front as you sniff, so that would be called that orthonasal olfaction, or as you're chewing food or drinking, drink, odor molecules that volatized can come up back through your throat and enter your nasal cavity that way. We call that retronasal olfaction from the back. And volatile just means it goes into the air?

And volatile just means it's light enough to go in the air. Okay. But the receptors are all in the nose. In lower primitive mammals, you're going to have also another variant called the vomorine nasal organ. This is part of the accessory olfactory system that can not only respond to some volatile chemicals, but also peptides can serve as olfactory stimuli in there. So the vomero nasal organ, when snakes are sensing their environment, they stick it into the

vomero nasal organ to like figure out scent trails. Is that right? Can we go a little more into detail about what that does? Yes. So snakes doing it a little differently. It tends to require contact in mice and rats. The mouse will generally stick its nose right in whatever that odor source is, whether it's the glandular secretions of a mate or a pool of urine or what might be. These are often social signals that can be sex or aggression, pheromones, or predator cues, or such. There's within the vomer nasal organ, which is just adjacent to the nasal cavity, there's a blood vessel that will sort of pump those molecules into the organ where they can interact with these specialized olfactory neurons, and that goes back to a slightly different

part of the brain. Humans don't have that organ, so it's a little bit different. So you have all those, and those are all located in the nose, and they project to a specific areas of the brain. Taste is very specifically the detection of non-volatile compounds like sugars and salts and acids and amino acids and variety of compounds that can be perceived of as bitter. They activate cells that sit within taste buds for the most part, which are basically just little onion-like collections of cells. And those are on the tongue, certain taste papilla, some of the bumps in your tongue. And they're also in the soft palate in my favorite German word, the Gishmachstrifen, which is the taste strip, which a bunch of taste buds in the soft palate. And then

there are also some in the pharynx in the throat. Those are connected to different parts of the brain, specifically to the brain stem. And that's carrying taste information. There's a third chemical sense, both smell and taste are detecting chemicals. The third chemical sense is known as chemosthesis. And chemosthesis is one you probably haven't heard the name of, but you've experienced. And that is when chemicals that are often in spices or herbs will sort of hijacked sensors for temperature or pain or vibration. So capsaicin and a hot chili pepper, menthol in mint, sensual in Szechuan peppercorns, these are going to basically be, naturally occurring chemicals that make this is generally trigeminal nerve sensors feel like they've

been activated. So capsaicin makes it feel like there's warmth there, even though there's no change in temperature because it's turning on a heat receptor. Menthol is cooling because it's turning on a cold sensitive receptor. Did you say there was one that triggers a sense of vibration? Yeah, the sensual in special white peppercornants, which are actually flower buds, gives you this little tingling aspect to it. I see.

So it's different from capcason. not a warm. It seems to have a bit of a warmth aspect to it as well. So some of these can be working across, but they're compounds in ginger and compounds in eucalyptus and all these types that the bed will do this type of thing. And is the chemical mechanism the same, the sort of lock-in key structure the same for all these different kinds of experiences? They are, although in these cases they're primarily attaching to ion channels, which are proteins that can be found by an external chemical, but then they open up and they let charge particles fly across the right. So they're not triggering an intracellular biochemical cascade. They're actually changing

the electrical properties of the cells directly. So just different families of proteins. But they do all come together, and this all comes together in the brain, and that's what we call flavor. So flavor is smell plus taste. You can bring chemisthesis into that. you can also impact flavor by site, for example, if either you remember Crystal Pepsi or any of these clear colas that came out a number of years ago. One of the problems was, as you looked at it, you expected a seltzer or a sprite or whatever not, and then you drank it, and there was a real disconnect between your expectation and what your taste and smell was telling you.

So sometimes those visual cues, temperature, and other things can impact how your flavor is perceived. But one of the big term confusions is how, I'd say the general population uses the word taste versus how we as tastes and smell scientists use it. When we, as scientists use it, we mean just those limited sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami tastes happening in the mouth. patient comes, they've lost their sense of smell, they may say, I can't taste anything. It all tastes really flat. If you were to test them with putting sugar on their tongue or salt on their tongue, it probably would work really well. But what they've lost is the complexity of flavor that comes from the odors that arise

from those foods. The ability to distinguish a lemon from a lime, if you're not looking at the color of it is not because one is sour and one's not sour, they're both sour, but one has a different complement of odorant molecules than the other that gives it a subtly different perceptual flavor. You distinguish smell and taste in terms of whether or not the things can volatileize. Is that just because it determines where it lands, like on your tongue or on your nose, or is there fundamentally different sweet of receptors there?

For example, to make it concrete, is there a smell of soft? salt? Like, salt doesn't volatilize. You're sitting in front of a crystal of salt. You can't receive any salt molecules on your nose. Obviously, you'll lick it, you taste it. But is there a smell of salt? If you could, like, pulverize the salt and spray it against your nose, would you notice anything? Basically, no, there's not. I mean, people often, if you ever looked at turbinato sugar, you know, that's a raw sugar, this hasn't been really refined. It has an aroma to it, but that's sort of that leftover molasses and stuff to do. If you were to get pure sucrose or pure sodium chloride and you knew there are no contaminants,

they're really not going to give you a smell. I mean, if you could somehow create a spray of individual sodium chloride molecules, my guess is there wouldn't be anything specific because that would be a molecule that would probably impact every single receptor. I just give you a background blur. So if you had to lose your sense of taste or your sense of smell, which would you rather lose? Oh, no. Smell easily. Wow.

Really? And that's not because in any way, diminish it. I don't want to lose either of them. Yeah, yeah. People who, I would say I would probably rather lose cider hearing than smell or taste. Once again, I don't want to lose any of them. The reason that I put taste at sort of the top of the list of not wanting to is because the people who really cannot taste it's much less common than people losing the sense of smell i've actually

met someone who actually born without a sense of taste and one thing that they so routinely describe is just how hard it is to eat i mean even to swallow food everything becomes very textually driven in the mouth so soft foods are really hard to get down and it just seems like a real challenge for them for the whole life. Wait, so soft foods are unpleasant without taste? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, there's something about without having that taste, but it's just purely the texture impact.

The yoghirts and cottage cheese, I mean, not that I want to eat cottage cheese anyway, but all these things are just very difficult. So usually what they will do is they'll try to add texture to it, which is to make. Anytime with a sensory loss, if you can make things multi-sensory in other ways that can help to offset some of those losses, we say that for people with smell disorders, explore adding different spices, adding textures, adding color to your food to make it more palatable, enjoyable, you're never going to 100% offset the loss of the ability to smell the aromas, but you can get it closer. A lot of South Asian food oftentimes are very popular with individuals who have lost their sense of smell because of the spices.

So you're saying crunchy blue cottage cheese is a better experience than white soft cottage cheese. Yeah, but that's a low bar. Let's take a break and we'll come back and talk more about smell and taste. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion, actually.

impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order.

order criminal justice system on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her.

Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I'm. I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro? Tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards.

If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lending. because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets.

I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse.

For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA.

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and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So this helps me understand a question I wanted to ask, which was about what happens when we get a cold and our nose is plugged up and things taste like cardboard. So I'm guessing now from your answers before that my taste hasn't changed because I can still put my tongue on things, but my sense of smell has decreased. And so my flavor experience has changed.

So I can still technically taste things when I have a cold, but I'm not getting the full experience. Exactly. So you're losing, you're having diminished flavor perception while your taste is the same. But that's being technically how we use it as opposed to the way most people would colloquially describe it as having diminished taste. But yes, taste and smell are differentially affected. There are a variety of reasons that people could lose sense of smell, sometimes very temporarily. like just having a head cold where you're just clogged up and so the odor molecules can't get to where they need to go. Sometimes it's because of shorter or longer term damage, everything

from viruses to inhale toxins or pollutants, sinus nasal disease. It may cause inflammation, allergies, head trauma, early stages, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other neurological and neurodegenerative diseases. exposure to the swamps of Virginia. Daniel. If I could just interrupt you, are those things like messing up the shape of the receptors or messing up the connection between the neurons

that talk to your brain, or maybe it's a combination of these things? They differ. So, for example, loss of smell is one of the earliest signs of what we call idiopathic or typical Parkinson's disease, even before some of the motor symptoms. While we don't know exactly,

how it's happening, what seems to be the case is areas of the brain that are affected by Parkinson's. Some of the earlier areas to be affected are ones that are important for dealing with smell. So that's happening in the brain, not in the periphery within the nose. Contrast that with COVID-19. So we've known for a long time that a variety of viruses, common coronaviruses that could cause the common cold, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, influenza. They could, in some people, will lead to temporary or permanent smell loss. In COVID, it was really striking how many people were losing their sense of smell very rapidly. And the large number of them, you know, probably about 10% may never recover that smell that they lost,

which is really hard for them to deal with. But we do know something about how that virus is causing this disruption. And so in the tissue in your nose where those sensory neurons are sitting that detect the odors, that's called the olfactory epithelium, there are other cells there that support those neurons' actions. There are supporting cells called sustentacular cells that are sort of balancing the environment. they may be putting out certain molecules in the area, they're providing support to the whole tissue. There are glandular cells. There are stem cells that are allowing the tissue throughout your life to constantly regenerate. It turns out that the virus doesn't directly attack the sensory neurons.

It attacks the supporting cells and the stem cells. And in some people that attack, that disruption of those cells, is going to be temporary enough. The cells, some of them survive, the neurons, aren't damaged indirectly enough to not be able to recover. Maybe the neurons are wiped out, but the stem cells are intact, and they're able to regenerate the tissue in a few days or weeks. But in other people, the damage is extensive enough that that does not seem to be the case. But it is sort of an indirect attack by the virus on the olfactory neurons rather than the neurons themselves being done.

Other viruses may work differently, but it is that peripheral damage that's the issue. Now, we also know that in a small number of people, there seem to be true taste effects and even chemistesis effects. You may have seen videos of people saying, oh, yeah, I'm chewing an onion, or I'm going to just shovel garlic into my mouth, not perceiving it at all. We don't know why or how the virus was affecting taste or chemistheesis. Those losses did seem to be temporary. I'm not aware of long-term losses in those senses. So I have a friend, she lost her sense of smell, and then when it can't. came back to you with smelling things that weren't there.

Is that common? And what causes that? That actually is very common. So if we think of smell disorders, we can break them into two different categories. One we'd call quantitative disorders. So this really a reduction or complete inability to detect or perceive odors. And the others are qualitative, somewhat changing the quality of the smell. And we can break those into two different groups.

Parasmia is distorted smell. So someone, you put a flower in front of your nose, you smell, and it smells like garbage. And that's, you can imagine, not good. Phantasmia is the perception of smells when nothing is there. I smell smoke. I smell. Sometimes, luckily, those are pleasant smells, but more often, like with the parisemia, they're unpleasant smells as well.

You mentioned fecal phantoms earlier that I have to follow up on. Yeah, fecal smells, garbage smells are ones that are very common. these often not exclusively but often will come sort of as the system is trying to potentially repair itself we see someone's getting they've lost their sense of smell so they have an osmia with no ability to smell or hyposmia reduced smell and that sense of smell is coming back but during that time perosmia or phantasmia emerges and while we don't absolutely know the cause it may be as the system's trying to rewire itself Remember, the brain is getting missed signals or creating signals looking for them when they aren't fully coming from the nose.

So that is, unfortunately, pretty common. And why don't we understand the cause? What's hard about these studies? Is it that we're talking about humans and brains and you can't just do whatever experiments you want? I think there are a couple reasons. One is that the senses of smell and taste were very much neglected from a medical point of view for many, many years. you lose your sense of smell, you go to the doctor, if they even knew anything about it, because they don't get taught about it in medical school to any meaningful extent.

It might say, oh, that's too bad, you're just going to have to live with it, or nothing we can do about it, and sort of getting passed off of that. There wasn't a lot of attention to it. The other is for those qualitative disorders, Horasmia and Phantasmia, we can't measure them in any objective way. We have tools to measure smell loss, there are a variety of, psychophysical tests that we can do that can allow us to quantify how sensitive you are to particular odors. With parosmia, we are entirely relying on the patient being able to

describe it and sort of relate. We just don't have the tools to investigate it nearly as well as for smell loss. You mentioned that the phantom smells tend to be like garbage or feces. Is there any hypothesis for why bad smells or what comes first? Does it represent anything about like, you know, evolutionarily smells that clue us into the presence of like disease causing agents are more important. So we put those online first or who the heck knows? I think it's both of those that you gave what I'd say is probably the leading hypothesis about it, that avoiding bad is more important. So it's sort of false to that, but there's really no evidence to support it just as the one that seems to make more sense. But yeah, we just don't know. And what about

On the other end of the spectrum, I remember hearing when I visited a perfume factory once in France that there are people who are like super smellers and, you know, their job is to like distinguish these smells and design new perfumes and there's like a very small number of these super noses and also that their noses get tired so they can only work for a few hours during the day and then they have to spend the rest of the day on the beach recovering from all this, you know, difficult smelling work. Are these people real or is the whole thing a scam and how does your nose get tired. They are real. Yeah. Generally, their professional term is a nose. Professional nose. And much like we were talking about earlier about Somiers and others, they've been trained.

They certainly have a good sense of smell. They probably are, if we look on the bell curve, they lean towards the better end of those abilities, but they've also really learned to recognize all these things. But the reason that they get tired is what we call it adaptation or desensitization and habituation, depending on where along in the nose and brain this happens. But basically, when you're having something stimulated over and over, you can sort of oversaturate a particular information channel in the brain, and it will dial down the gain and you become less. So you have to take breaks.

Even when we're smell testing people, we work in breaks within it so that they don't get sort of overwhelmed and saturated, so they're attuned to the next thing. all experience adaptation. You go into a bakery and you smell the cookies and the breads and everything and then you're there for a few minutes and it just says it goes away. You don't really notice it anymore. Part of that is the gain of the system being down. Part of that is your brain attending to novel stimuli and all of that. I don't know if they head out to the beach, probably most of them are from Paris or Geneva. But yeah, there's a real physiological reason that they

need to have those breaks. Well, I used to know a guy who lived downwind from the Nilla Waifer factory in Houston and he said he had to move away because he was gaining weight because it just made him eat all the time and it makes me wonder about the sort of subconscious effect of smells I mean are there smells that affect our behavior that we don't consciously experience are there for example human pheromones that you know attract you to somebody or not do perfumes actually do that to people there's no good evidence of human pherombs and by a pheromone specifically mean a odor chemical that's given off by one member of a species that acts on another member of a species to change its behavior or some physiological response, like a hormonal

response. We don't use those. But certainly, smells can affect our interactions with each other. You talk about two young mothers who lose her sense of smell. One of the things they'll bring up very early, you know, my baby's head. I love smelling his hair after you got to wash yourself. There definitely is a link between smell and emotion and sort of that bonding and all those types of things. Romantic partners will often talk about enjoying the smell of their partner and things like that, but these are not innate triggering pheromers in that way. But similarly, it can be your friend had the nilla wafer experience and that triggered, you know, intensity. Maybe you're around frying baking all the time or whatever it is.

But people who live near hog farms that have these large pools to deal with the waste, there are a lot of studies about the increased depression. Equal lagoons cause people to get depressed, you're saying. Yeah, exactly. Wow. So, yeah, those aspects are very real. When I was in college, I remember in my evolutionary psychology class learning about these studies where like men wore shirts and then the women smelled the shirts and then rated which men were

the most attractive. So that's not pheromones. Has that study since been debunked or was there something else that they were picking up on? There certainly are questions about the extent of that. I mean, certainly the concept of women's menstrual cycles coordinating in dorms and things like that that may be a smell related. I'd say they haven't always been replicated to the sense. So I thought that one was fairly debunked that it's more like a statistical. You're just going to overlap 25% of the time by chance or something. Yeah, exactly. But it's also not something I think a lot of people are spending a lot of time studying at the moment.

And if we have some understanding of the chemical mechanism of this, can we make progress towards things like recording sense digitally and then manufacturing them? You know, can I create an artificial nose with all of these receptors, write down the signals, and then create something which puffs out those molecules on the other side? or I could like email somebody a smell? There are a lot of efforts in this area. And you can imagine artificial noses being used as sensors for all sorts of things. Biosecurity types of questions, they put them in fields to know when the props are ready to harvest or if there have been an infestation, things like that. A lot of these could be more specialized.

You would certainly love to have, you know, there's a lot of evidence that the aromas that an individual gives off if they have cancer or, If they have some other disease might be unique, if you could identify these chemicals. There are dogs that have been trained, although that's really hard to make a regular part of it because just the amount of training and how you have to go through that. But if you can have a sensor, a wand, you could wave over someone to detect that. That would be a miracle. But there's also commercial ways for trying to replicate this with food or with other types of aromas you might like to recapitulate.

For example, a lot of the flavor houses now will usually go around and sample things. They put a dome to capture the odor headspace over a plate of food at a particular food truck that you like, or you put it over a Borneo forest, and collect all the volatose coming off a particular group of plants or whatever not. Take those back, use modern, biochemical, chromatographic, mass spec types of techniques to define not only every single model, but also it's relative concentration, which is very important. And then they can recapitulate these. They can do this chemically, but then can you also,

you know, send it along to have a production apparatus on the other end of that email that can then puff it out. People have been trying that to various degrees for decades now, and I think the technology is catching up to be able to do that in a much more sophisticated way. So I could email California to Kelly, Kelly, so she can also enjoy the sense of the ocean and the floral notes. You know, I'm going to try to be nice and not mention that right now you'd probably be sending

me the smell of burning homes. But Virginia's got some perks, man. Yeah, this seems like maybe a running. Yes, this is a running debate. So my question is, I hope a question you haven't heard before, which is about smell and taste on other planets. Given the usefulness of smell and taste and our knowledge of the evolution, history on Earth, what do you think the chances are that aliens, when they evolve on their

planets, smell and taste or don't smell and taste? How likely do you think this is to be ubiquitous to life in the universe? I would think it would be more ubiquitous than other senses. There are chemicals everywhere. The universe is chemicals just deranged in different forms. And so being able to sense that is really integral. You look at unicellular organisms, whether they're bacteria, protozoans, or whatnot, they can all sense the chemicals around them. These are fundamentally primitive forms of smell and taste. So, yeah, I think that is clearly going to be a thing. Whether it is put together the same way that we have, it's interesting that while the

receptors in a fruit fly and a human, the receptors for odors and for taste are molecularly completely distinct from each other, those two families. It's not a single evolutionary origin of the odorant receptors across those different phyla, but the arrangement of what the sensory neurons look like, how they're arranged, connected to the brain and how they arrange is actually remarkably similar. And those have independently evolved. So there seem to be some strategies that have benefited from that conservation, or at least limited repertoire of options, while other ones are free to sort of evolve independently and come up

with more than one solution to the problem. Do aliens like cilantro, a question we don't yet have an answer to? Maybe one day. All right. As someone with anxiety, I'm still dwelling on the fact that I called your research weird at the beginning. What I meant was I asked you weird questions because of what you do. Okay.

I don't remember that. Oh, good, good. So then the lead in is you just started this new center for smell and taste. disorders. Tell us a bit about your new center that you're co-directing. Well, thanks for that opportunity. It's something that we've seen over the last decades that there's a huge need for. And what that need is we have massive underserved population of people that are experiencing disorders. But the amount of research that's going into trying to better diagnose them, better support them and eventually better treat them is really small.

One of the small bright spots of COVID was because of the prevalence of smell loss, taste loss that associated with COVID, it brought a greater attention and understanding of the broader population about how impactful these disorders can be. But we still have a long way to go and we don't want to lose the momentum of that knowledge and appreciation from it. So the center is really trying to areas within its mission. And one is patient care. So being able to make sure that someone who has a smell or taste disorder, has a place to go to get diagnosed, perhaps identify an underlying cause that might be treatable as well, to get support such that they better understand how to improve the palatibility or the food,

how to be safer with gas leaks and fires and spoiled food and things that they may be hard to detect. How to get emotional or therapeutic support if they're being depressed, which is very common. Of course, changing their social relationships. We also want to facilitate research, and that's everything from the very fundamental building blocks of smell and taste and how it works so that we can better understand how it may not work when it's very. but also clinical studies looking at diagnostics and treatment. One of the studies we're doing right now is trying to answer a very simple question is, how much does your sense of smell normally vary?

Morning versus night, day to day, if you're pregnant during menstrual cycle, if you have other types of disorders so that you can have a baseline to understanding. So if you're going to get your sense of smell regularly tested, do you actually know what's just normal variation versus an actual pathologic change that needs to be dealt with? So we want to train doctors and scientists in this field to a better degree than is often the case. And then we want to reach out to the community, education, and engagement to fill people, whether it's with a disorder or whether it's for people who chefs. winemakers and who not that are using smell and taste as part of their livelihood and how they make their way through the world to help them better understand that as well.

Awesome. Well, congrats on the new center. I learned a lot today. I think I'm going to appreciate the next piece of food that I eat even more and appreciate how complex it is. I love that we learned the thing about vibrating. The next time I go to a Chinese restaurant, I'm definitely going to order something with extra sesuan. So yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show. for having me. It was fun. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you.

We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message.

Email us. at Questions at Danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D&K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us.

December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, every day. Everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. Terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation,

we're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving. Takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast.

Grasias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there.

Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending with a little bit of cheesemeter and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Grasias Come Again on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you'd be. get your podcast.

This is an IHeart podcast.