Ideas - Smell: The Invisible Superpower

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Smell has been called the 'Cinderella sense,' capable of inspiring profound admiration if we stop turning our noses at it. Producer Annie Bender examines what we lose when we take our powerful — but often misunderstood — sense of smell for granted.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. How would you describe the sense of smell to someone who had never experienced it? To someone that never experienced it? Yeah. Wow. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

It's a really good question. It's a good question. Smell gives you, I don't know, an extra layer of depth. It gives so much texture to life. A sense of smell is such an immediate connection to place and experience. For me, it's the ultimate tool to connect to things. And without it, everything is neutral. In the textbook of our senses, smell has long been relegated to the margins. We don't really pay attention to our sense of smell. You know, if you ask people, if you had to give up one sense, which one would you pick? And they often would say, well, I would give up the sense of smell.

I feel like it's taken for granted. It's been called the Cinderella sense, chronically underestimated and ignored. You've got this cultural dimension, which was codified by the ancient Greeks and then was very strongly revived in the Enlightenment and in the early 19th century. But whatever bias we might hold against smell, aromas themselves are inescapable. You know, right before you get the bread in the oven, you have to slash the dough to get that nice oven spring. And the whole house fills with baking bread. And the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a devastating and widespread loss of smell, has renewed interest in its power. We've kind of fooled ourselves into thinking we've got a rubbish sense of smell, which is just not true.

We've kind of fooled ourselves into thinking we've got a rubbish sense of smell, which is just not true. We can train our sense of smell, we can exercise it, and we can smell billions of odors. It's a superpower to embrace. We're calling this episode, Smell the Invisible Superpower. This thing's really loud. Okay. Producer Annie Bender will take it from here. What would you use this for?

So this is the bandsaw, so you cut up pieces of wood with this. Derek McLeod is a furniture designer based in Toronto. He works out of a big industrial space that backs out onto a tangle of train tracks. Oh, wow. That is literally like 20 feet away. Yeah. Awesome. That's a lumber.

Yeah. Just like the trains rolling by, the walls of Derek's workshop are stacked high with pieces of lumber. And the scent of wood is everywhere. So if you were to look around this space, what would be some of the scents you would associate with a space like this? It's hard to describe a smell. Like I know that walnut had a particular smell and like pine certainly does as well. Cedar for sure. Like that's aromatic cedar is a big one, you know, for closets and things like that. I don't know, like cedar is sort of a warm, warm smell. Let's put it that way.

Whereas walnut is maybe more, I don't know if you'd say earthy or, I'm not sure how you'd put it into words at this point. Yeah, I couldn't really accurately describe them anymore. Derek lost his sense of smell in 2017. He still doesn't know what caused the loss, and he's never gotten used to it. For me now, my smell world is not even gray. It's just blank. There's just nothing there. Yeah, it really definitely threw me into a depression. Like, I had to see a therapist pretty quickly after that to try to cope with the sense of loss and the strangeness of the whole thing. To get over that strangeness, he's had to let go of his memories of smell, including the

scent of wood. I guess I don't associate the shop with smell anymore. It's like that memory is vanished. It's just sort of gone. I can't conjure it. I can't really conjure any smell memories anymore, which is a strange loss, I guess. The sense of smell has a very intimate connection to our emotional world. It has also a very intimate connection to our memory. My name is Johannes Fresnelli.

I'm a professor for anatomy at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières. And my lab focuses on smell and taste and the link to the brain. One smell that I really love is the smell of pine trees, because it makes me go back to my childhood where I would spend summers up in the mountains, in the Alps, in a cottage where we, you know, were for a month at a time. And this smell is just something that is very, very calming to me and brings me back to nostalgic moments

of which I really love thinking. Close your eyes and you can probably conjure up a smell memory of your own. For me, it's the scent of maple syrup. Even just thinking about that smell can take me back to my childhood, bundled up with my cousins in the sugar shack, waiting to be granted a spoonful of that deliciously sweet, sticky hot liquid. This power of aromas to transport us back in time is known as the Proust effect, named for Marcel Proust, who wrote about it in his novel In Search of Lost Time. Is there a scientific explanation for that connection between smell and memory and nostalgia? Yes, there is.

And so if we want to understand this link, we have to look at the brain. When we smell something, there's a receptor in the nose and they send a signal to the brain. And this signal is then processed in the olfactory processing areas of the brain. And the olfactory part of the brain, it's the so-called limbic system. This part of the brain is a very old part of the brain, if we are looking at it from an evolutionary perspective. And this part of the brain is responsible for smelling, but also for emotions and for memory. So the reason for this intimate link is that it's the same parts of the brain that process. And so if we get an input from one side or the other, we can trigger these memories, we can trigger these emotions with smells.

or the other, we can trigger these memories, we can trigger these emotions with smells. This scent and memory trigger is well established. But when you ask people which scents they'd give up first, time and again, the sacrificial lamb is smell. A 2021 survey in the journal Brain Sciences found that people consistently ranked smell below vision and hearing and even below commercial products. A quarter of college students surveyed said they'd rather give up their sense of smell than their smartphones. But a world without scent can feel incredibly empty. Hi!

Hi! Hi, are you Jessie? Yes! Why don't we start by having you introduce yourself? Yes, definitely. So yeah, my name is Jessie Cabot. I was born and raised in Paris. And I've been living in Montreal for nine years now. I was fully conscious that I had for Christmas and we were all outside and my family was complaining about outdoor smells, like really not pleasant ones. And I quickly discovered that I couldn't smell at all. And since then, I think I went through the five stages of mourning.

There was a long, long period of denial. Then came rage last summer. And still today, trying to figure out who I am now without that with me, because it changes my whole relationship to the world because I feel like I'm involving in a neutral environment and that's I lost all nuances Do you think the sense of smell is undervalued? Definitely. It is definitely undervalued.

And I think it goes back to the 19th century. The church played a role in this. Darwin showed that we are related to other animals. And the sense of smell is very important for many animals. And it's very closely related to our emotional world, to the hormonal world, to our memories, to a very deep section of our brain where we do not have a very easy access rationally. And so there was a backlash that wanted to show that we are different from animals. The human is this noble being that is visual, that is hearing, that makes literature, that talks to each other. And this stayed on for centuries.

A long line of philosophers and scientists played a role in the historic demotion of smell. Aristotle, who was the first to introduce the idea of the five senses, put vision at the top of his hierarchy. In the 16th century, René Descartes declared that sight was the sense of science. During the Enlightenment, philosophers Georg Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche followed suit. Immanuel Kant famously declared smell to be the most dispensable of all the senses. To which organic sense do we owe the least? The sense of smell. It does not pay us to cultivate it or to refine it in order to gain enjoyment. This sense can pick up more objects of aversion than of pleasure, especially in crowded places. And besides, the pleasure coming from the sense of smell cannot be other than fleeting and transitory.

Sigmund Freud was yet another famous olfactory detractor. He claimed that human sense of smell became irrelevant once we stopped moving around on all fours. Smell was seen as a base animalistic trait that humanity had supposedly risen above. In effect, our noses became passé. There is a common misconception that we think we humans have a bad nose. We can smell billions of odors. There was a paper several years back in science that actually claimed we would be able to smell a trillion of different odors. So now maybe it's not a trillion, maybe it's just 100 billion or 10 billion or 1 billion, but it's an extremely big number of odors that we can smell.

There are studies that have shown that if you look at the detection threshold, so which is the lowest concentration that you need to perceive an odor. On average, dogs are better than humans, but for certain smells, humans are better than dogs. Like what? What are some of the things that we're better at smelling than dogs? Yeah, alcohols, ethanol. We are very sensitive compared to carnivores such than dogs. Like what? What are some of the things that we're better at smelling than dogs? Yeah, alcohols, ethanol. We are very sensitive compared to carnivores such as dogs. And we are very sensitive to them. And of course, in evolution, it's always difficult in hindsight to say, you know, this was like that. It's an interpretation.

But it was, of course, important for our ancestors when they went through the savannah and they were hungry. And there was, you know, some tree with some fruits on it it and the fruits were really ripe. And so they emit those alcohols that our ancestors would be able to smell them and detect, oh, this is a food source for us. And for a dog, this is not so important. And, you know, for these odors, we are better than dogs. We are better than rats. than dogs. We're better than rats. This connection to our ancestral diet points to another of smell's essential functions. Because beyond its ties to memory, smell is also deeply connected to taste. You've likely heard this before. Outside of the basics, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, this before. Outside of the basics, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, most of the nuanced flavors we experience are actually processed not through taste, but through olfaction, the scientific

word for smell. Without it, our experience of food and drink is more texture than taste. I stopped drinking coffee. You know, that's part of your morning ritual. And it hit me. I was sipping it, and it's just like, this is just weird water, weird hot water. It was such a strange sensation that this beverage I've loved for 20 years is now wrong. It's just broken. Let me tell you another example that may convince you that our sense of smell

is actually much better than we think. You know, if you take the dog that is this wonder of smelling as this awesome nose, but you can give him the same kibbles every day, every morning, every evening, and you will have the happiest dog in the world. And now imagine, I mean, what is your favorite food?

Oh, I don't know. Butter chicken. Okay, butter chicken. Okay, let's assume I give you butter chicken tomorrow morning, tomorrow lunch, tomorrow evening. And we repeat that the day after and the day after again. After one week, your favorite food, you cannot see it anymore. And after three weeks, we have a revolution. Although I week, your favorite food, you cannot see it anymore. And after three weeks, we have a revolution, although I gave you your favorite food. And this is because we constantly

need excitement, we need stimulation, but we need diversity. And this retronasal affection, the perception of smells from the mouth, by the nose, by the back door, this is extremely important for us humans. We have developed incredible amounts of cultural techniques to process our food, to make it more tasty. And when we say tasty, it's actually smelly, to just make it better. We can roast, we can sear, we can grill. And this shows, again, that it depends on what function

of the sense of smell you're looking at. I just had a trip, an international trip, so there's duty-free shops. If you go to the duty-free shops, you have perfumes, tobacco, you have alcoholic beverages. They all come with the sense of smell. There's a whole luxury industry all around the sense of smell. If the sense of smell would not be important, well, all these industries wouldn't work. They wouldn't make any money but they work we are spending a lot of money on our sense of smell and this again shows that our sense of smell is more important than we usually think if you could get one smell back what would it be

boy hmm oh my god i've asked those questions myself so much i was thinking of my great-grandmother's house and she would make lunch for my brother and i she'd make this hungarian dish uh tudor taste which is cottage cheese and noodles, and it's cooked with an unhealthy amount of butter. And that gets browned on the stove, and, like, that browned butter, sweet sort of caramelized smell. The sea. My parents live in New Zealand. It's a paradise place, and we are surrounded by the sea. And going to my family

house and not being able to embrace all these smells that make you realize, ah, I'm definitely in holiday. The smell of smoke, like around a campfire or when you're barbecuing something. I miss the Christmas tree. It's been two or three years that I'm here. I can see the tree. I can touch it. I mean, there's all these elements that are evident that we are in Christmas, but I don't smell, which makes me feel that I'm a bit, again, detached to it. You know, right before you get the bread in the oven, you have to slash the dough to get that nice oven spring, and it pops open, and it looks beautiful.

And the whole house fills with baking bread. Full disclosure here. I've never really known how good or bad my sense of smell is. So I found myself wondering, what might I be missing when it comes to smell? You can get better at it. So we can train our sense of smell, we can exercise it, and we can get better in naming odors. And this is actually what sommeliers do.

And this is the fascinating thing about sommeliers. And that's also the fascinating thing about our sense of smell. We can exercise it. We can get better. But we have to do it on a very regular basis. I think what is important is, you know, it's like everything else. Nothing comes for free. You have to actively smell smells and think about the smell

so it's not enough to watch tv and and you know have a battery of smells going by on a conveyor belt in front of your nose that wouldn't help anything you have to actively smell you have to probably talk about the smells to other people smelling recognizing naming remembering hi kate are you able to hear me i can hear hear you Annie, can you hear me? Oh great, I was worried that my microphone wasn't working for some reason. If I wanted to become a more active smeller, I'd need a guide. So I tracked down a professional smell enthusiast. My name's Kate McLean and I am a designer, a researcher who's really interested in how we might communicate smell perceptions in different places around the world. Kate spends a lot of time

helping people tap into their sense of smell. For the last 12 years she's been running what she calls smell walks in cities all over the world. What exactly is a smell walk? A smell walk is, it's a walk where the first piece of information that you get from around you, rather than coming through your eyes, is you try to get that information through your nose. And yes, you do an awful lot of sniffing. So it's kind of like a walk in which you try and engage your inner dog. Exactly. Yes. Couldn't have put it better. That's exactly it. How many smell walks have you done at this point, do you think?

Clearly, I keep a log of all of them. And I think the last time I looked, I'm somewhere around sort of like 200 mark. the last time I looked, I'm somewhere around sort of like 200 mark. Having done 200 plus of these smell walks, have you gleaned anything about smelling techniques that I might want to know? Smelling techniques, there's some really useful ones that you can deploy to actually sort of like gently ease yourself into the process of smell walking. Smell catching is first. This is the real refocus on yourself to receive smell as your primary source of information. So smell catching, you walk steadily, you breathe regularly and you note when a smell crosses your nose. So you're basically smelling in the air around you. And when you detect a smell, then the idea is that you actually actively

sniff to inhale more air and as a result, inhale more olfactory molecules of whatever it is that you've detected. And as you're doing that, you're recording some details about the smell or you're thinking about them. What comes next is where you start to deal with smells as close up. So you can pick things up and crush them in your hands to release odour from them. Green leaves are really good for that. You break them and you release green leafy volatiles and you get the unique scent from them. Green leaves are really good for that. You break them and you release green leafy volatiles and you get the unique scent from leaves. So you're saying, well, okay,

if I was going to give that smell a name, what would it be? You're thinking about the intensity of the smell. Is it a particularly strong smell or is it a weak smell? And you're also thinking about how long does that smell last? Is it something that's just temporary or does it appear to be more permanent? Another very cool thing to do actually is to think about the associations that you have with it. Where have you come across it before? What's it like? Do you like it? Do you dislike it? And possibly even if the smell had a colour, what colour would it be? Oh, that's an interesting one. Is that something that you come across a lot? Do you have one that you think of as being a particular colour that you could share with us?

There's the really obvious ones like the smell of the ocean is for me, it's never that bright like crystal clear aqua it's much more of a sort of like a greeny greeny almost chalky greeny brown color because you've got the smell of kelp mixed in with the smell of sea mixed in with the smell of salt and so you're going for that like that whole mix it It sounds quite poetic. It's very poetic. It's ever so poetic. Well, I'm gearing up to go out on a small walk now. Is there anything you would recommend that people who are engaging on a small walk avoid smelling? No, actually. I mean, it's not illegal, but smelling other people's armpits, you may want to ask me first.

Fair enough. Well, I'm very excited to give this a try. Have fun. You're listening to Ideas and to a documentary titled Smell the Invisible Superpower by producer Annie Bender. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National,

and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more.

I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley. The list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the airwaves were abuzz with dispatches from a world without smell. It's been about three weeks.

I made a cup of coffee and I didn't smell it and I didn't taste it. And I would sniff and sniff and there would be absolutely nothing. It was so severe, I could have literally drunk a cup of vinegar. But as the world moved on from the virus, and the loss of smell became a less common symptom, those testimonies have largely faded away. I'm definitely like interested in trying anything at this point. Our sense of smell has often been ignored and even denigrated. But in today's episode, we're bringing you inside the miraculous world of smell, courtesy of producer Annie Bender.

Smell of number one. We're at Balls Falls hiking area in Ontario. I smell nothing. I smell... nothing. One of the things that quickly becomes apparent when you start trying to engage with the world knows first is just how difficult it can be to talk about scents. I've opened a small shed, and inside I found...

very fragrant firewood. Ah! And inside I found very fragrant firewood. But I'm realizing I don't know my types of wood, so I can't describe what type of wood I'm smelling. We don't have so many words to describe smells. Sometimes it's almost easier to use the descriptive terms from other senses. You can have smells that are warm and smells that are cold. So if you think of a minty smell, you'll think of it as a cooler smell. If you smell something that is a little bit more spicy or curry, then you may think of that as being a warmer smell.

Kate McLean has devised a way of matching words to a given scent. But in general, our vocabulary for smell, at least in English, is surprisingly threadbare. If you think about it, the words we use to describe smells are virtually always other smells. Matthew Cobb studies smell at the University of Manchester. If you think of people doing wine tasting, they'll say, oh, it's got rose and tarmac and boiled sweets. And they come up with all these analogies, which are in fact the other smells. And we don't have words that are just related to smell. That's not quite true.

There's a handful of them. Dank, fetid. And they're not terribly nice words. So those words we have, but that's about it. And in everything else, we don't have a vocabulary for it. Walking on a busy Bloor Street at night in the summer. And it's the smell of garbage. Bags and bags of garbage and compost sitting out waiting to be taken away in the morning.

It smells like, I don't know, just like decaying stuff you definitely don't want to spend too much time around. If you look beyond the English dictionary and other European languages, the vocabulary for scent becomes much richer. The Quechua language, for example, which is still spoken in the Andes, has eight different terms for the act of taking in odors. In Cameroon, the Kapsiki people have 14 distinct categories for different types of smells.

But there are also exceptions among European languages, particularly in industries where having a good smell vocabulary is a key part of the job. So we set up here, I suggest that we set up here. So I'm going to cut what we call a perfume organ. And this is our tool. So the perfume organ that contains, what, 70, 80 raw materials, I'd say? More or less, more or less. To start, can you just introduce yourself, so who you are and where we are right now? Yes, so my name is Ruby Brown. I'm the founder of eponymous brand Ruby Brown.

We are here in our studio in Montreal in front of what we call the perfume organ, so we can just sit, chat and smell. Amazing. It's hard to think of anyone more fluent in scents than a perfume maker. And the language of perfume is surprisingly musical. You call this the scent organ? Exactly. What a cool name.

Organ like a musical instrument? Exactly, because basically just like in music, we work with a chord in order to get a composition. So very similar the way we work. And there's different tiers, is that significant? Yes. And different colours. Different colours, so where all our notes are identified as head, heart or base, depending on their impact and their tenacity.

Whatever Immanuel Kant said about smell's supposed dispensability, the perfume industry reflects a reverence for fragrance that stretches back thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians believed they could reach the afterlife by climbing a staircase of perfumed incense smoke. In the first century AD, Pliny wrote that perfume was one of the most elegant and honorable enjoyments in life. I've heard scientists pine for a look at the perfume industry's incredible olfactory data sets. After all, perfumers have been studying and celebrating smell for much longer than scientists have been researching it. And their terminology mirrors that fact. So we all agree on five or seven olfactory families.

So the first, the most popular one, especially here in North America, is the floral. Powdery notes. Delicate. Fragile. Freesia. So you have those powdery notes, but you also have the exotic flowers. Niroli, which is orange blossom.

Second olfactory family would be the witty. Everything that's kind of witty and green and spicy would fit in that category. Mossy notes. Black pepper. Third family would be the oriental family. They're notes that were brought back from the Middle East. L'Orient. Rich, creamy, enveloping, addictive.

So vanilla, tonka bean, very enveloping and sensual. Then we have the citrus. That's really interesting because in perfumery, we have a word, a very specific word that we call espiridique. The last family would be the leather family. A bit acidic. The last family would be the leather family. Animalic, leathery. So very bold and powerful.

Notes such as leather, obviously, but also tobacco, which is probably one of the most surprising notes on the organ. All these different descriptors for fragrance seemed pretty straightforward. But when Ruby and her colleague Axelle started uncapping little bottles of fragrance for me to smell, I lost confidence. Quickly. This one, I'm going to try to see if I can identify it. Oh, this smells like food. Yeah. Oh, it smells really yummy. Like, it smells like a savory dish that I really want to eat.

But is it like, you know, cumin? You wouldn't have something like cumin in a perfume, so it must not be that. Oh, I don't know. I think I need you to tell me. So it's very local. It's actually maple syrup. Oh my God. My parents make maple syrup.

Like, how could I not know that? I grew up going to sugar shacks. That's funny. I thought it was something like much. Why would it be that I would smell maple syrup and think spice? It's very difficult. I love to have people smell stuff that are part of our everyday life. Rice is a really good example.

I'd have you smell rice, you'd be like, what is this? I know this, I know this. And I'd say 97% of us won't identify the rice. Right. Why is that? Do you think that it's so hard to identify things? Because we don't really pay attention to a sense of smell. So it's there somewhere in our memory, but we don't, we never take the time to just sit down and analyze and put words into smell. I took my discouraging smell performance back to scientist Johannes Frasnelli. Despite everything you've said about how good humans are at smelling, I found it surprisingly difficult to identify certain scents, even things that seem like they should be really obvious.

Why is that? How common is that? Well, it is actually very, very common. We are very, very context dependent with our sense of smell. If you see a banana in front of you, it's going to smell like banana. But if you smell the same banana and you have no other information, it's going to be extremely difficult to smell that banana. If I give you an orange juice that I color blue, this orange juice will taste, and again, taste is not really taste, but it's actually smell, much less like orange than an orange

or yellow juice, just because we have this extremely important component of the context with the sense of smell. And if we do not have the context, such as, you know, smelling just some bottles where you don't know what is in it, it's going to be extremely difficult. One of the reasons that identifying odors may be so difficult is that they're so complex. The example I normally give is a tomato.

Smell scientist Matthew Cobb. People have looked at the odors that are the molecules that are given off by a tomato and you will get around about 200 different odors coming off that tomato. Plus we live in an environment which is full of what the delightful technical term is insults. So there are chemicals in our environment which may be damaging our nose. It's through the weather as well. When it's cold, things don't smell as good because the molecules can't drift in the air. They're not volatile, as they say. Smell log number six.

Squaw Riviera in the cold evening rain. It's hard to actually smell the rain. But if I breathe in really deeply, then I can. I think that's a cold rain smell. Different from a summer rain smell. Maybe a little bit more subtle. Despite our widely shared struggle to describe and identify odors, Despite our widely shared struggle to describe and identify odors,

scientists like Matthew Cobb and Johannes Fresnelli remain convinced by decades of lab research that humans are better at smelling than we think. So I decided to go and smell it for myself. Nope. Just want to know what the invisible doors are. Johannes Fresnelli studies the neuroanatomy of olfaction out of a lab at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières. His lab manager, Frank Cloutier, showed me around. So here, that's the 2-phenyl ethanol. This is rose. This ishuh. This is rose.

This is the scientific name for rose. Do you ever open it up just to get a sniff for aromatherapy in a stressful workday? No. It's funny, but no. It's a tiny space, just two rooms on a narrow corridor. The first is a chemical lab where a row of cabinets house a miniature smell library. Like here we have like coffee. Oh, that's, yes, I know that one anywhere.

We have a strawberry. We have a lemon. We have a lemon. So we have those. We have a lot here, like different, like lemon, fish. Fish. Almond. Almond, yeah, yeah. Peach. Peach.

Smoke. Yeah. Peach. Smoke. With help from Frank and a team of students, Dr. Fresnelli uses this lab to better understand how the brain processes smells. We rely on our sense of smell more than we actually think. Dogs have incredible abilities, you know, tracking and finding animals and whatnot. But there are studies that show that we are also able to do that. We can learn that. We can follow a scent track. We can get better in it.

Wait, I'm sorry. We can follow a scent track? Well, there is a study that was done 20 years ago in Berkeley where they put the scent track on the grass in the campus and they had people follow the track. And they showed that people, A, could do it and B, got better at it. And of course, the scent track they had people follow the track and they showed that people a could do it and b got better at it and of course the sand track they put there wasn't a deer smell or something which would be probably good for for dogs but they put the chocolate trays there and with the chocolate trays people could could do that probably dogs would be better i need to know i need to know more about this this if they had a piece of chocolate in the grass? No, no, they put some scents there.

I don't know how they, you know, some drops, I guess. And they just moved it along the grass in a zigzag. And then they had their participants blindfolded. And, you know, they could not touch anything and see anything or hear anything. They could just rely on their nose. And then they followed this scent track. That's fascinating. And people were able to do this with no prior training.

They could do it, but when they got trained, they got better and better at it. Not everybody got better, but roughly half of the participants got better. I looked this study up. The trail that participants followed was in fact a 10-meter long piece of scented string. The participants were blindfolded with earmuffs and big gloves on their hands to stop them from feeling their way around. And do you have any other questions to that study? Yes. People were doing this without any prior training. Like anyone, anyone that you blindfold and put down in a field would be able to do this.

That is what the study says. I haven't tried it myself, but I believe that we are able to do that. You know, maybe at some point when spring hits, we can try it out ourselves. I don't know. I mean, I just have staggered. I don't even know what to say. Not everyone would be as surprised as I was by this study. In a book from the 1990s called Aroma, the Cultural History of Smell, a trio of researchers at Concordia University observed that many forest-dwelling indigenous peoples relied on smell rather than

vision for their distance perception, because it's easier to detect far-off smells than to see through the dense foliage. In the Amazon rainforests of Colombia, the de Sona, who refer to themselves as Wira, or people who smell, have been known to track the scent of animals, humans, and plants. They call these trails of scent wind threads. And while the average Westerner is far less conscious of these wind threads, we're constantly taking them in. Smell log number 15. December 15, early May, I'm standing out on my little balcony and I can just smell the fragrance of lilacs wafting up from the driveway where there's a tree. It took me a minute to realize where the smell was coming from, but it's just perfect. You know, the sense of smell, first of all, protects us from dangers in our environment.

We smell gas, we smell smoke, we smell rotten food or something like that. Another aspect of the sense of smell is everything that has to do with feeding and with food perception from a very young age, from the attachment mother to child, smelling the breast while breastfeeding and then finding food sources. And then the sense of smell has a third very important function, which has something to do with social communication. So we communicate with each other non-verbally via the sense of smell. It's typically unconscious, but we communicate if we are related, if we are partners, if we are strangers, if we are happy, if we are sad. All this is communicated via our body odors and we are strangers, if we're happy, if we're sad, all this is communicated via our body odors,

and we process it even if we usually don't perceive it consciously. And all these functions would get lost if we lose our sense of smell. So our life becomes a little bit colorless, poorer, less social interactions, or flatter social interactions, and that, of course, can be quite problematic for some people. or flatter social interactions, and that, of course, can be quite problematic for some people. The first that comes into my mind is my boyfriend's smell. For Jessie Cabot, losing her sense of smell back in 2021 left her feeling profoundly disconnected.

Like being close to my boyfriend and not smelling him, and that's really, really confusing. And it's hard because it's something that I used to adore because it was my way to connect with people, to fully embrace the presence of a person, and I don't have it. So I feel very much detached to people. It's very neutral. Everyone is neutral to me. Odour and identity are deeply associated with each other

in many cultures around the world. Among the Onggi of the Andaman Islands off the coast of Myanmar, people's very selfhood, their life force, is believed to reside in their smell. And while we may not love to talk about body odor in the West, we consider it entirely normal to breathe in the scent of a partner, say, or the top of a baby's head. Generally speaking, we all have an individual body odor. And this body odor is further modulated by the emotional status we're

in. So there are studies that have shown that, you know, they took the parachuters and the researchers gave them some t-shirts in which they put a breastfeeding pad into the axillary region. And these pads would then soak up the sweat that was produced by these parachuters. And when they safely landed, they had, of course, had quite extreme fear during that time. The researchers took those T-shirts and gave them to another group of participants that they were watching a horror movie. And when they were exposed to this kind of sweat,

they found the horror movie much more frightening than when they were smelling the odor or sniffing the body odor, the sweat odor of somebody who had just been cycling or something like that. So which means we are also communicating this kind of information, but we have no idea yet what is the substance that causes this. And this is something that's quite difficult to study actually, but there is research done on that question as well. So we're all subconsciously smelling things and each other all the time as we move around in our environment without realizing it? Yes, yes. And in most cases, we are not aware of it.

Smell log number seven. Walking along Rue Sainte-Catherine in Montreal at night. Rue Saint Catherine in Montreal. A night, a windy night. I just caught a whiff of someone's cologne as they walked by me. It smelled musky and warm. Just a hint of spice. And I just caught another whiff of someone else's cologne. It was similar, musky, warm, just a little rash of scent. And then it passed me by. Dr. Fresnelli isn't just interested in the ways that we're subconsciously using smell to communicate. He's also interested in what our sense of smell, or more specifically changes to our sense of smell over time, may be able to tell us about ourselves. And he does much of his research with a retro-looking, futuristic-sounding machine called the olfactometer.

Right away you can smell it. Rose, eh? Yes, yeah. This is the olfactometer. This is a big machine. So people will sit down here and they will take some tube like that and then they will put the tube in the nose, okay? And they smell. And so this huge machine, it's taller than me, and so the odorants are in these cylinders and the entire apparatus, like tubes everywhere, in this tall system with all these different compartments. These are all here essentially to keep each of these odorants

separate from each other so that they don't get contaminated with other smells, with my smell or your smell or anything else that's around. One time I brought some lunch here for me, and the guys just, hey, Frank, don't do that. We can see on the screen that the electrical activities because the people are smelling. I remember one woman say, oh wow, that smells really good this lunch. What is it? And they could see on the electrical activities in the brain. So this is not good.

activities in the brain. So this is not good. Your lab manager, Frank, told me that the olfactometer doesn't actually measure anything. It sounds like it would, but it's essentially a smell dispenser. Yeah, you're spot on. It's not a machine to measure odors. There is other olfactometers, and there's probably people out there that have olfactometers and they actually measure the smells. That's not what we do. And what is, I was saying it wrong, the olfactometer allowing you to study? Our main research question is with regards to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. in Parkinson's disease. Nearly everybody who has Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease loses their sense of smell 10 to 15 years before the actual diagnosis. Currently, we do not have methods to heal the disease. We can stop the symptoms, we can maybe slow it down in the case

of Parkinson's, but there's nothing we can actually do. And the reason for that is that we detect those diseases when they're relatively far progressed, which means that the degeneration in the brain has already happened. So what we are looking for is to find methods that allow us to say with certainty, several years ahead, this person has a high probability to suffer from Parkinson's in 10, 15 years,

and this person has a high probability to suffer from Alzheimer's in 10-15 years. If we would be able to do that, then we could develop interventions that could slow down the progression of the disease or maybe stop them altogether. So there's different methods that we can use and one of those methods is with smell testing. smell testing. One of the problems with developing this sort of smell test is that, as we saw with COVID-19, people lose their sense of smell for all kinds of reasons. Dr. Fresnelli estimates around 20% of people at any given time will have a problem with their sense of smell. But of course, most of those people won't go on to get Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. So what we're working on is finding a specific pattern of olfactory dysfunction specific for those medical conditions. And this is why we need an olfactometer to do that with

high precision. It does sound like smell tests could be quite a powerful medical diagnostic tool. Yes, but olfactory markers do not have the importance in the diagnostic procedures yet that I think they could have. Do you think people would benefit from having routine smell exams alongside eye exams? Well, of course, my heart as a researcher says, yes, yes, everybody should get smell tests. However, we live in a real world. Everything comes with a price tag. Oh, don't worry about that. So we have to, of course, think about that as well.

But during COVID, when so many people lost their sense of smell, we all of a sudden saw we have basically no infrastructure to do smell testing. And smell testing can actually give us information. After centuries of derision from thinkers who rejected olfaction as inaccurate and unscientific and even subhuman, modern research is finally revealing the intricacies of smell. Dr. Fresnelli's research on the use of smell tests to diagnose illnesses is just one hint of where the science of smell may be headed. And as we open up our noses, we're also opening up entirely new dimensions. We don't know how many dimensions smell has. And it still, for the moment, defeats us,

although we've nearly cracked it. And my guess is within the next maybe 10 years, we'll have a much better idea of what's going on. If there was one thing you could convey to people who still have the sense of smell, but maybe don't think about it that much, what would you want people to think about differently or to know, I guess,

as someone who's kind of gone with and then without it? Good question. Yeah, I would say, like, be more mindful about it. Like, there was a reason why we were able to smell things and just, yeah, embrace it more, like like because it gives so much texture to life I think it is underappreciated how how vital and how how much it enriches your life I want people to just take it in take every little thing in throughout their day, good and bad. I mean, Earth gave us so much to smell. There's such a big repertoire. And yeah, it's like a superpower.

It's a superpower to embrace. There's a whole invisible world out there and I don't know about you but I intend to take it all in one breath at a time I'm in Kensington Market on May 1st and I'm walking past a freshly cut lawn and the smell childhood and springtime and all things green. You've been listening to Ideas and to a documentary called Smell the Invisible Superpower. This episode was produced by Annie Bender. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

Technical production, Danielle Duval and Gabby Hagorilis. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.