Smells Humans Are Ridiculously Good At Detecting

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Bossils can show us the past, but research is shaping the future. And for more information about cancer research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org-forward-slash-rest-is-science. Hello, I'm Hannah Fry. I'm Michael Stevens. And this is the Rest Is Science. We're talking smell today, Michael. Smell? Yeah. Okay, well let me ask you this, Hannah. What do you smell right now? I like honestly, not very much. I mean, my house, I'm going to have a scented candle on in the corner, don't it, the moment. I sort of can't really smell anything. I mean, this is like, is the inferior sense? There's not much going on. I can't smell anything. Whoa, the inferior sense? How do your nose can hear what you're saying? It's going to testify against me one day. We're going to talk about that in this episode. Is our sense of smell inferior in some way? But I want you, the listener, to also answer this question to yourself. What do you smell right now? I can smell, I can kind of smell the soda I have in this mug over here. It's pretty weak, but otherwise, yeah, it's a pretty odor-neutral environment that I'm in. I think we live in very odor-neutral environments, or we think we do. Because I wonder if we swapped. If we did like, kind of, we invented wormholes for the purposes of this discussion, and then just immediately swapped, you kind of came into my house. I came into your studio. I reckon in the first instant of walking in there, neither of us would think that it's smell of nothing. I mean, I like to imagine that you think that mind smells of roses and beautiful perfume, and like, you know, window cleaner and like, you know, fabric softer, and all of the lovely smells. Yeah, and it probably would, right? It would smell like something. It would not smell like the nothing it smells to you. My favorite game to play is to go on a vacation and then come back and stop before I go into my house and just prepare myself to smell myself. I can smell what my house smells like to guests, because I've been gone for weeks. And for like a half a minute, I'm going to be able to smell what they smell. That's a really fun idea. You got to do it. I also have a game that I play when I go on holiday, which is if it's going to be a really nice holiday, I will buy a particular scented candle. And I want to light it where I'm on that holiday. Said this on my honeymoon, for example. And then in the future, whenever I want to feel like I'm back there. So I have like four or five different scents that it's like put on that candle, I'm transported back to that place. That's brilliant. You know, there was an artist who created necklaces that contained a little ampule of a very unique smelling compound. And if something ever happened in your life that you wanted to remember forever, you could break the ampule and have this new scent that would be tagged at that memory for the rest of your life. Oh, that's a fantastic idea. Well, hold on a second, right? If the inside of your house smells like something to everybody else and to you for the first few moments when you arrive back from holiday, I wonder what else is constantly around you that also has a smell that you can't smell. Yeah, what is the inside of your nose smell like? Well, if we're going to get to the bottom of these questions, I think we should first turn to an assumption, which is, which is still quite popular. The fact that smell is the inferior scent. Should we start there? Yeah, give me your case. This is essentially Victorian's being dismissive of anything they didn't consider high-falutin, right? So there's a French guy, Paul Broker. Broker? Broker. I say Broker. Okay, so Broker Broker. In the Victorian era, he like started looking at, particularly the olfactory bulb in the brain, which is actually incredibly small, particularly compared to other animals. And so he said, look, this is kind of pathetic for us. And actually the the Victorians, the sort of the English scientists at the time, they were very happy with this. They were like, this means that we've transcended the kind of animal-like senses, right? Like we've got sight and hearing. That's why we can do art and science and have intellect and smell and taste. They're sort of much more animal-like, right? It's more like about kind of dirt and lust and like savages. Those are the things that have that care about smell. Right. We've evolved out of it. And that essentially is the reason people are very snobby about smell and have been for a long time. That's so Victorian. Very Victorian, isn't it? But at the end of the day, we're made of dust and lust. And pretending that we aren't is like the classic predicament of our modern age, Hannah. You couldn't smell the difference between coffee grounds and soil after rain. You know, pencil shavings or wet dog. If you spend even a moment thinking about this, which perhaps the Victorian should have done, we are so good at smelling that you can put a ripe banana, right hide it in a drawer or like in a cupboard or something and then get a person to go in and ask them to guess what has been hidden. And people will get it right. We are incredibly sensitive to this chemical that gets released by ripe fruit. We're so sensitive to it, we can detect a few parts per trillion. We can weigh, weigh, weigh more sensitive to this than dogs are, by the way. Dogs don't really care about ripe bananas. Humans honing on it. Absolutely want to know. Yeah. Okay. So there are things about our old faction system that are pretty impressive. So I want to direct our attention to a really great paper from 2010. It's the whole thing is a great read. And they address the fact that there's this problem in the way we think about smell. We think that dogs are great at smelling and like cats are really good. But humans are bad. It turns out that humans aren't bad. All mammals have like the same kind of old factory system. Humans can differentiate seemingly trillions of different smells. Trillions. If you give them two smells and you say are these different, they can tell down to tiny percent changes that it's different. However, that doesn't mean that we can identify trillions of different smells. We have to be paying attention to smell. We can also we can tell the difference between the smell of spearmint and then caraway. If you can imagine how distinctive those two are, those are actually when you look at the molecular structure of those two, the molecules that give them their distinctive flavors, they're actually totally identical to one another. It's just that one is the mirror flip of the other. Essentially it's effectively like being able to tell the difference between a left and a right-handed glove. That's essentially how good we are. Have you ever smelled Ethel Morkaptin? No. You have, if you've ever smelled a gas leak. Because propane natural gas, these things are odorless. But that's dangerous. If there's a leak, no one can tell unless they've got special instruments. So they add a chemical called Ethel Morkaptin to propane natural gas, the stuff that comes out of your stove, your gas stove. That stuff doesn't normally smell. So when you smell it, when you think you're smelling gas, you're smelling the odorant that's added so that we can detect it. I want to give you a little side story. When I was a kid, a truckload of Ethel Morkaptin crashed near my house. And it smelled like there was a gas leak. But actually it was just the odorant. And every day on the school bus, we would drive through this area where you could smell that odorant. And the kids would all go, oh, don't light a match. It's gas. And I'd be like, actually, that's the Ethel Morkaptin odorant that's added. And then it became, well, I became the odorant boy. Like they just mocked me whenever we smelled it. They'd go, Michael, is that actually gas or is it the odorant? Oh, look at me. I'm Michael. And I've never forgotten that. I like to imagine that a young Michael Stevens was just exactly the same as you are now, just smaller, just literally identical, just a slightly smaller version. Yeah, just imagine this head with this beard, but on like a kid body. I bring up Ethel Morkaptin because we are really sensitive to it. We can detect .009 parts per billion. That's the equivalent of like three drops in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Okay, you could put three drops in Olympic pool is big. I could do that to one pool and not another. And you could tell me which pool had it and which one didn't. But this brings us back to where we started, Hannah. When you put this odorant, the Ethel Morkaptin in gas, you don't put in .009 parts per billion. You put in .5 parts per million. That's 57,000 times more than we need to detect. Why? Because even though we can detect small trace amounts, it doesn't get our attention. We have to be slapped in the nose by a smell to notice it. We can listen, but we only pay attention if it's screaming. That point about how we have to be kind of slapped in the nose in order to notice it. That's not true of other creatures. So there's the story about in the 1930s in Texas, they were building these gas pipelines across country, these huge, long pipes that would go for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Because they were pumping in natural gas, they had Ethel Morkaptin added to it. Of what they noticed was that every now and then there would be these turkey vultures that would circle above the pipes. And one of these gas engineers initially were like, what on earth is going on there? Why are these vultures obsessed with this particular section on the pipe? They were going to investigate and time after time, they would find that the vultures were circling over where there was a leak in the pipe. And so it kind of became like folklore, if you like, among gas engineers in this particular area, that you look out for vultures and that would tell you where a leak was. And then in the 1960s, a couple of scientists were like, this sounds nonsense. I think they hadn't honed it down to being Ethel Morkaptin at that point. They just knew that the vultures were circling. And this group of scientists were like, okay, our vultures really hunting based on smell. So what they did is they got a dead pig. They hid it in some woods under a bit of topulin. And then in another separate sort of woods, they just constructed the same experiment, but there wasn't a dead pig underneath the topulin. And like, almost immediately, these turkey vultures managed to find the dead pig, but weren't interested at all in the other bit of topulin. And it turns out that Ethel Morkaptin is like this compound that is released when bodies decompose. Oh wow. So essentially the smell of death, the attractives vultures, but that we are deliberately putting in as this like smell signature in order to sort of save us from gas leaks. That makes sense that we would evolve to be really sensitive to an odor released by decaying flesh. It's a good danger warning for vultures. It's a dinner bell. But either way, it's really salient. You need to know if it's around. But humans in particular have to be punched really hard to notice a smell. If we are specifically told to try to smell something, we take a different kind of a sniff than usual, not a breathing sniff, but a smelling sniff. And then we can detect something. But if we're just normally breathing, there needs to be a lot of odorant around for us to notice it. And there are a couple of really fascinating consequences of this. And they all point to why we think smell is such an inferior sense. The second thing though is what I found the most fascinating, which is that it's also related to attention. And it's the fact that humans have remarkably bad, olfactory coordinate systems in our brains. We can find bananas, but we can't find a lot of stuff the way other animals can. When a room smells, the room smells. We don't think, oh man, that area of the room is smelly. The way that we would with sight or sound. If I'm in a room and there's a sound, I'm like, oh, that the workers on the roof are loud or the refrigerator is loud. It's really in my awareness in a spatial location. Same with a light, the source of a light. It's very much about a point in space where the light is coming from, but smells are just present. We don't have binocular smell like we do binocular sight. Even though we have two nostrils, we don't do a good job of going, oh, yep, okay, let me go right to where the source of the smell is. It's just a stinky place. And there's a theory that we don't rely on smell much because we just don't have the same conscious interior map of smells that we have for our other senses. Yeah. If you think about color, right, you can put color on a spectrum. We sort of have like a map as it were of like how one color relates to another. With smells like sure, we might be able to smell like the, you know, the scent of ground, the smell of pencil-shaped things, but it's not like we're able to relate one to another. That's right. There's no rainbow of smells. Yeah. Where we're like, oh, make that a little bit more xyz. And funny enough, if you read up on smells, you'll find three systems of organizing odors listed. Mm-hmm. And none of them have a link to an article. Like none of them are common enough or clear enough that it's expounded anymore. It's just like, oh, yeah, some guy tried to create a spectrum of smell or a coordinate system of smell in the sense of like sweeter, more bitter. I don't know. It's hard for us even to describe them and compare them the way we can talk about color. So is the idea then that in other animals like dogs, for instance, which we know to have this absolutely phenomenal sense of smell, not just in sensing it, but also in mapping it physically, right? Like, and paying attention to it and paying attention to it. I had this story once. I was talking to someone who was an ex-army dog trainer. And he told me this story about how during major conflicts when you have these military zones, you have people who are often trying to smuggle vast sums of cash over these borders. And it could be really punished, right? It can be really dramatic. It can be used by arms. It can be used to the bride people, all that kind of thing. So of course, the military want to try and stop these like, the chunks of cash getting smuggled. So what they did is they took all of these dogs and they took them to a lab in the lab. We're going to teach these dogs how to smell money. And like, money doesn't have like a distinctive odour, but there's lots of things like the ink, the kind of the oil that's left around people's hands. There's like a kind of catalog of different smells that might be associated with it. And the dogs in the training were really good. Like, they were amazing at finding these these words of cash, no matter where you'd hide them. And exactly as you're describing, the dogs are able to like, spatially pinpoint precisely where the smell is coming from, rather than just that the smell exists and is there. Anyway, they then took the dogs out into the field and tried it again. And all of a sudden the dogs were absolutely rubbish, right? Like where they'd like, got hit after, hit after, hit in the lab, take them out to the military zone and they just weren't able to do it. Even when they had people who were subsequently caught smuggling cash, the dogs had like not managed to let it go. They were really wondering what on earth was going on until they finally realized that the difference between the lab conditions and the military zone was that when in the lab the money had been wrapped in cling film in order that people wouldn't steal it, it didn't go everywhere. And they had inadvertently stored in this extremely expensive program these dogs to detect cling film. Oh, and that's how good these dog smell is. Like, this cling film really have that strongest scent? No, I think money in cling film, I couldn't smell the difference. But researchers shown that we can, we just choose not to. Just choose not to. Yeah, and we just don't sniff enough. That's human's problem, Hannah. A rat, especially, like every breath they take is a sniff. There's a difference between a like, I'm breathing through my nose and I'm smelling through my nose, right? Well, multiple times a second, a rat is smelling. It's like bringing odorant molecules from the environment up into its olfactory bulb to think about an experience. But we only do that every few seconds. Most of human breathing is just for the air. And then every so often we might go, take a bigger one that really gets odorants on that olfactory bulb. But because there's such a long gap in between them, we don't often notice changes. It's a bit like if you looked at two pictures where, you know, there's only like, find the seven differences. They're, you know, they're similar pictures otherwise. If you look at one and then you don't look at the other one until a week later, you're not going to do a very good job. If you, if you look at them simultaneously, it becomes easier. We have this thing called change anosmia where we cannot detect changes in the odors around us unless they're really extreme. Now, this is based on change blindness, a famous thing that we've known about for a long time when it comes to vision, that we often don't pay attention to a scene and a little bit of it can be changed and we won't notice. But for smells, we basically live in a constant state of change anosmia. You really have to be properly smacked in the nose. The spot the difference picture has to really fundamentally change for you to notice it effectively. Yeah, yeah. You know, actually also, we think of rats as smelly, but maybe we're sort of conflating the smell of rats with the smell of sewers. Do you reckon rats can smell sewers or smell themselves? Oh, I bet they can because they're just, there's so much more attentive to smells. Well, given that in London, you're never more than two metres away from a rat. I'll just nip downstairs if I can find one and ask them. During the break, shall I? Oh, uh, see if I can do that. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. 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For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. This episode is brought to you by Thriver. Most of us tend to think of blood as something slightly finical, linked to illness or bad news. But in reality, it has been quietly keeping a record of what's going on inside our bodies, almost like a biological diary. It holds clues about how everyday choices shape our health, sleep, stress, food, movement, and without access to that information, staying healthy can feel more complicated than it needs to be. Thriver is a proactive health platform that lets you check in from home using regular at home blood testing with clear guidance to help you understand what your body is telling you. That sense of clarity changes how health feels. Instead of juggling advice, rules, and trends, you get a simpler sense of direction, what looks consistent, what's shifted a little, and what's actually worth paying attention to. It just makes health feel calmer and simpler to think about day to day. Head to Thriver.co to get started. That's THRIVA.co. And use code TRIS for 20% off your first test. All right, welcome back. Hannah, what did the rats tell you? Nothing. They ran away as soon as I approached, which is, you know, one of the good things about being much, much larger than them. Great, and they could smell you coming. I saw them sniffing the air pointedly. Actually, on the subject of sewers, there was a kid in my class at school whose dad worked in sewers. And he would always say that you would only smell for the first couple of minutes. And then after that, just smell like nothing. What is weird is that even when you try, you know, like there's lots of things that you pay attention to, don't pay attention to, they sort of blend into the background, but when you can actively make a choice to pay attention to something, that's interesting that even when you try and smell the inside of your nose, you can't. I know. It's called Ulfactory Fatigue. You cannot try to smell even if you try, because you've adapted to the point at which your neurons cannot even respond to that smell anymore. One way this happens is called a climatization, where the actual vesicles in your nerve cells, the container neurotransmitters that send them across the synapse, that has to happen for you to have the smell experience, but they've run out of vesicles. You just used up way too many because you can't stop smelling the inside of your nose. All of it's happened. They've run out of the ability to transmit messages, and so you don't get it anymore. Even if you try, they don't have the letters, they don't have the paper to write the letter to your brain on. You've used up all your spins, basically. You've used them all up. So you can try, and you're just never going to smell your nose, because you smelled it, I guess, like, when you were born, for one and a half minutes. Yeah, it ran out. It hasn't been able to replenish. Now, there will be changes, because the inside of your nose can smell weird when you have a cold, or when there's something weird in your mucus, and then you'll gradually get used to that. You'll notice when the smell is gone. So you only get these brief windows of awareness of your own scent, and then it's gone. If I ever lucky enough to attend the birth of another human, the main thing I'm going to be thinking about is as they immediately are born into the world and take their first breaths, it's going to be lucky you. Another part of change in asmia is adaptation, that we wind up adapting to smells really quickly. So when you go into a fish shop, as you first walk in, or even not to make a direct comparison between the two, Michael, but when you return home after your holiday, you can smell it in the first few moments, and then after that, a set amount of time passes, you can no longer smell it. Well, yeah, but it's called sensory adaptation. It doesn't just happen with the nose. It happens with vision and sound as well. You can get used to the sound in a place. You visit someone's house, and there's this noise, and you're like, doesn't that annoy you? They're like, I don't hear it anymore, but with smell, it happens really quickly. So it's about efficiency then, essentially. It's about our brains finding like the most efficient way to process information and ignoring anything that's not important to us in the moment. Yeah, it is. It doesn't mean that we are receiving no all-factory data. It just means that it's all non-conscious. So there has been a lot of research recently on the non-conscious influence of smells around us, where we don't think we're smelling anything, but we are. We think that we enjoy a scent for all the wrong reasons. They've done a lot of studies on like deodorant smells, and it's been found that people prefer deodorants that are the closest in molecular structure and odor to the person's own natural cellular scent. What? Explain that to me. So there was a study done famously on dirty t-shirts. I'm starting with a different study, where they looked at what kind of sweaty t-shirts that were worn by men, straight women would prefer. And they preferred the smell of shirts that were the most different from the natural odor profile of the woman. Okay. So you are looking for someone who smells different to you. That sort of makes sense. It makes sense for perhaps like an adaptation to avoid inbreeding. Right. Is there an extreme, I mean, I do sort of wonder whether there's like, there's a sweet spot here. Like you want someone who doesn't smell it absolutely the same to you, but you also want someone who's not too far away from you either. You know? I don't know. It's a bit difficult to finish that sentence without claiming that some humans really smell, but they do. Right. Right. What we all smell, we all smell. The inside of our nose is all smell. I think if if we scraped some mucus out of your nose, I could probably sniff it and go, oh yeah, that's that's got a smell. Please, Dave. I beg you not to. I won't do it. But I'm just saying that like we have a smell and we just we can't smell ourselves. And I spent a lot of yesterday trying to find the best way to smell your own scent. And we just don't know how. Because you could like shower. Okay, showering makes it hard to smell yourself. But as soon as you get out, you've altered your own smell. You can leave your house for weeks and come back and the scent of your house kind of gives you a sense of what you smell like. Apparently that trick that perfumists use where they have someone smell coffee beans in between in order to cleanse the olfactory palate. Apparently that doesn't work. People aren't able to smell things better after sniffing coffee beans versus lemon juice or just plain air. Let me go back to that deodorant thing though. Oh, because I'm intrigued by that. Wait, so people prefer deodorant that smells more like them. That's right. So then years later in a follow-up study, some researchers had women take showers and then put on deodorant and some of these deodorants were built, like chemically made to mimic the chemical composition of the outside of that woman's cells, which is a very particular thing. It's unique to each one of us that's part of what makes us smell like ourselves. And the women weren't told that this was the case. They were just told, oh, we're trying out different smells. But the there were there was no masking smell. It wasn't like it's lavender with some of you in it. It was just you or not you. And the women preferred the deodorants that had their unique genetic chemical composition. Because it smelled more, I don't know, familiar. Like them, like familiar. This is a bit of me. Yeah. Because I am interested by that. And the reason why is that I think like when it comes to sort of hygiene, and like cleanliness products, I also think that there's something about how the kind of the more neutral smell, we sort of don't really like that idea either. And I'm basing this on for breeze. In the 1990s, they came up with this actually really, really clever bit of chemistry, where they came up with this new chemical. It's called cyclo dextrin. And essentially, what is this ring shaped molecule? What it does is it manages to trap odour, like the literal compounds inside of it. So that it's not just masking smells. It's not just covering them up with other sense that are much stronger. It's something that actually neutralizes them. So that then when they go over your olfactory bulb, they don't bind to it. Exactly. You literally can't smell them. So that's how it works. That's how originally it worked. And so the idea is that you spray this stuff on like pet beds and like smoking rooms. Then it totally worked. So they did all of these experiments. They were like, look at this. Great. We found kind of the holy grail in a bottle. And then they launched it, sent loads of free samples to households who had like cats and, you know, teenage sons and like smokers and whatever. And people didn't use it because they sprayed it all around. And they couldn't smell the difference. You know, they couldn't smell their own home. They couldn't smell the synchiness of their own home. And it just smelled like nothing. And nothing didn't feel clean. So instead, they like reformulated it, added perfume to it, added like a kind of a smell that doesn't need to be there like a smell of cleanliness. And that was when it really took off as a product. Wow. I mean, it's the same as like toothpaste, right? Like menthol or like minty taste. There's nothing, you know, you could have toothpaste that like, I don't know, taste it like bacon, right? Like it doesn't matter. Right. Well, it smelled like or taste it like. It's just we have like linked certain flavors in our minds to this idea of cleanliness and hygiene. Yeah, which I think to revisit the inferiority of smell brings us to maybe a point that I'm willing to agree with more, which is that we definitely think of it as being inferior. Even though it doesn't need to be, many studies have done this where they've taken cherry flavored liquid and they've changed its color. And people will decide that it has a different flavor than it really does. If you take a cherry flavored liquid and you die at orange, people will say, Oh, it's orange flavored because they're relying on vision. They're letting that trump what they actually taste and smell. If you take that same cherry flavored liquid and you die at green, they'll say, Oh, it's, I think it's lime or kiwi maybe. They just do not allow themselves to surrender to all faction alone. They trust their eyes, nothing else. All right. Then I accept that, you know, our smelling senses is weaker than our other senses because we're choosing to ignore it. But I think the question is what would happen if we did pay attention? We have like this ability there. What if we did do more sniffing? So there was this really excellent and frankly, hilarious study, which tried to ask that question, which was essentially like, could humans smell as well as dogs? So they got a group of 32 human subjects, human volunteers. They gave them a blindfold. They also for some reason gave them ear defenders. And then they tried to see if they could follow a trail left by some chocolate essence that a bit of twine had been dipped into. And then dragged for 10 meters across a lawn. So these people, it's very undignified to this entire experiment. They basically were butts in the air, noses to the ground like proper, you know, dog sniffing territory we are. And it turns out they actually were able to do it. They actually were able to follow this trail that had gone through the grass. They even tried, they even tried a 45 degree bend to see if they could work out at what pointed it turned the corner. And I mean, they were actually, I mean, look, they weren't as good as dogs would have been. And that's fine. But they were there sniffing deliberately paying attention to their sniffing. They were wearing gloves as well, actually, which probably aligns with your theory of like minimized touch. You know, they're not, they're not exactly bloodhounds. But in most cases, they were able to follow the trail. And crucially, the more they practice, the better they got of it. Maybe it is partly a question of practice. But also, I think that there are some people who are going to be better at this than others. And there are some people that are known as super smellers, essentially people who are like very, very good at paying attention to their old factory system. And also very good at detecting even small amounts of molecules that the rest of us can't really distinguish between. So there's this incredible story, Joy Millen from Perth in Scotland. And she started to notice one day. She always been a good smeller, right? But she noticed one day that her husband had this like very particular scent about him. And she'd be like, have you washed? Are you using a different shampoo? Are you using something different? Why do you? Why do you smell like that? And he was like, nothing's changed. Like, you know, it's, it's, it's, I am, as I have always been. But over time, she was absolutely convinced that his smell had changed. Anyway, a little while later, her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's. And a little while later still, she attended a conference for people who were suffering from Parkinson's and their loved ones. And as she went into the room, she was like completely flawed by the fact that all of the people who had Parkinson's in there had this exact same smell that she had detected on her house. And she said that she was like drinking cups of tea, sort of talking to people and basically going up to them and sort of like justicesly sniffing them just to like check if they were also someone who had that smell. Anyway, at the end of the conference, she goes up to the the academic who is giving the presentation. And she says, you know, there's a smell associated with Parkinson's, right? Like, you know, asking it as a question. And this, this medic was like, no, like, what are you talking about? This is absolutely nonsense. But he was so convinced by how like totally determined she was to tell him that there was this distinctive smell that he set up an experiment for her to really test whether she actually could smell Parkinson's. So this Parkinson's researcher, a guy called Tilo Kenaath from the University of Edinburgh, he was like, okay, this seems really unlikely, but I'll give it a go. So he sets up an experiment where he has 12 people wearing t-shirts. I mean, similar to your t-shirt experiment earlier, but six of them were just like ordinary men, nothing interesting going on, and six of them had Parkinson's. And he wrapped up these t-shirts and he gave them to joy to smell them. And she ended up getting 11 out of the 12 correct, correctly identifying every single person who had Parkinson's. And the only one that she got wrong was that she said that somebody had Parkinson's when they didn't. Not one false positive. And everyone was like, this is, this is really just like incredible, right? This is like absolutely amazing, even that she'd got that many correct. But then eight months later, that person who she had sniffed Parkinson's on ended up being diagnosed with Parkinson's. She'd got the full whammy, right? Like 12 out of 12 correct. And this like incredible feat, there's just this one woman who had like detected with her nose, this like combination of molecules that are concentrated in sort of the oily sebum that in the skin of people who are going to develop the disease has like opened out this whole new area of research of like electronic noses essentially. We are so biased by vision, right? That most of our diagnosis that happens, happens through like visual means, right? You know, you take a test to a lab and they look at it on a slide. You kind of, you take someone into a medical scanner and you look at the X ray or whatever it might be. You kind of go into a doctor and they take a look at your, your complain. And this opens up a whole new world of like maybe there are ways to diagnose disease that are much more around smell rather than about vision. Wow. Super smellers. I'm more of a super stinger. She'd be amazing as a perfumer wouldn't she? Toilet mill. She'd be like, she'd be all over the place. Well, yeah, she could do, I don't know why you would want this, but you she could design a perfume to make you smell like you had all kinds of diseases or even like you smell like yourself. Like imagine if there was like a Michael Stevens perfume. Oh, I would love that. I would love a perfume that smelled like me. Yeah. You would go smell it though. Oh, okay. That's the problem because I want to know what I smell like. But the we live our lives with this blissful ignorance where we just focus on the things that we need to be focused on. You know, they call this the centipede's dilemma. There's this great poem. A centipede was happy quite until a toad in fun said, pray which leg moves after which? This raised her doubts to such a pitch. She fell exhausted in the ditch, not knowing how to run. And so as soon as someone says, wait, think about what you're doing or explain what you're doing. You go, oh, shoot, like I don't know. It's just it's happening without me having to be aware of every little bit. But once you make me think about it all, once the centipede is asked, what's wrong with your 34th left foot, then it just goes, whoa, that's too much. I don't know. So when it comes to the question of what does the inside of your nose smell like? The answer is you'll never know, but thank goodness you won't. Yeah. That's a good answer. It does have an odor. You can non consciously detect it. Other people can consciously detect it, but you will never know what it smells like. And it's good that you won't want a beautiful way to end this episode. 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