The Future of Smells

one of you smells bad, at least one. I just I just showered this morning, like right before I came into the office, I doused myself an ax body spring that explains it clean. And yet, what are we even talking about? Smell? Joe? Well, I was just kidding. You're as spragrant as ever. Jonathan, I am no. I was wondering about smells. Yeh. Is there a future for smells? Because frankly, to me, smell is, you know, all all of our senses are important, but it's sort of the

most superfluous one. It's not like I'm a dog and I use smell to really navigate the world and find the things that interest me, like piles of garbage and something under a bunch of dead leaves. I don't know, it's it's down there somewhere. No. I I don't really use my sense of smell for all anything all that important. So does it really matter in our lives? And I don't know does it really have that much influence on

the way we see the world? Yes? All right, So if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of forward Thinking, uh no, the short answer is is it absolutely? And of course sorry, the follow up question is what's the futurist smell? Well? Also, we wanted to mention that we're going to be covering how smell can affect us and to what extent that that we know of it

can affect us. And this is sort of part of a it's a small part of a bigger discussion that we're going to continue in a future episode about the things that can influence our decision making processes and whether the future is going to involve us uh consciously employing those things to perhaps guide us to a brighter, happier future. That's not at all orwellian um, Hey, those serious concerns are for another day to you. We're going to talk

about stinky stuff and smells in the future of smelling. Yes, as we said, the word smell enough. The first thing we need to do is actually establish how smell works. And fortunately, you know, the three of us all work, actually the four of us, because Noel's here to all work that we're including our editor in our discussion today. Apparently literally is acknowledging his work. Whatever. All four of

us work for how stuff Works dot com. And one of the articles that you can find, one of the many amazing articles you can find on there, is how Smell Works by Sarah Dowdy. And uh, it's really interesting to see how smell actually works. So we sense smells using cells called chemo receptors. Yeah, they're in our nasal cavity. It's kind of interesting to think about the ways that you're different. Body senses are based on different types of

matter and energy. So your eyes are for the electromagnetic spectrum, a particular part of it. Your ears are for vibrations of matter in the air, right, actual physical phenomena. Yeah, and your nose and your tongue, so smell and taste are for they're basically a chemistry set. Yeah, chemical particles. Yeah, they essentially the shape of a molecule. Pretty much. I mean I'm oversimplifying. Yes, we think the shape of the

molecule largely defines what it smells and or tastes. Like, So you have odorance, that's the stuff what stinks right, Um, this would be the little stinky line coming out of Peppy Lap you when you see those old cartoons. Uh, those stimulate the chemo receptors, which pass on electrical impulse to the brain. The brain decodes that message and interprets it as a specific odor, which leads us to the perception of smell. So let's let's that's the big picture,

big picture, base level. Let it go straight into your nose exactly. We're gonna we're gonna dive into the nose. We're gonna pick it clean. Folks. Here we go. Alright, So, like how you had to wind up to that one. That's great. So you've got these olfactory receptor cells in your nose. Uh, they are neurons. So these are a type of neuron. Basically, anything in your body that's sensing anything is neural. Yeah. So so the neurons are complete

wood and drites. That's typical. Expect that with the neuron. Those are the little squidly things that kind of extend to poke out. So they have the dentrits with these particular cells have old factory hairs, which I'll talk about in a second, and they line a part of your nasal cavity. It's the olfactory epithelium. It's actually a very small bit. It's maybe like an inch square over yeah, inside inside your sna And then that's it. You do

all you're smelling with this tiny little bit here. That's it, and uh, mucus covers it, you know, good old snot covers it, right, because mucus is actually a solvent for many odorants. A lot of odorants are either alcohol or water soluble um, and so so they help break down any chemicals that happen to be floating around in the air, right, so that your olfactories cells can actually interpret what that is and thus send a signal to your brain of

what smell that is. Yeah, your mucus does stuff, Yeah, cool stuff. That's stuff that's actually useful as opposed to just making everything gross. Wait a minute, then I have a question. How come when your nose is full of snot, you don't smell super strong? Well at that point, at that point, the covering is so great that nothing's getting to the the olfactory sensor cells anyway. Okay, I see, it's like a little goes along. It's a cruel joke,

is what it is. It's also cleaning off well, I mean, the basic function of that is is that it's trying to get rid of any bad stuff that's gotten. It's it's essentially trapping various types of external stuff that shouldn't be there and trying to let you get rid of it either by swallowing it or blowing out your nose. Hey, how that? How the cool is that? Walk me through the love story of a chemical molecule and the and the old factory cell in your nose? All right, here

we go. So you've got a volatile substance, all right. So volatile substance is something that can easily turn into a gas. Something that can't turn into a gas, something that's non volatile doesn't really have a smell, yeah, because it's not giving off anything for you to smell. It's not actually getting in your nose. You can't get any Brownian motion out of that staying in the stuff. Yeah.

So the volatile stuff that it can turn to a guess that's what gives off the odorants, which are essentially just airborne molecules. Some of them find their way into your nasal cavity. Now, the molecules bind with the olfactory hairs that I talked about earlier. They're on those dendrites of the receptor cells. The mucus dissolves the odorants that need to be dissolved, and then the receptor cell is stimulated by this molecule. And here's where we get into

some academic disagreement about what's going on. There have been a lot of studies that have looked into the science of smells, and the fact is, like a lot of things with the brain, we don't have the full story yet, so we don't necessarily know which of the various models

is the most correct. But according to Richard Axel and Linda Buck, who did extensive research into old factory sensing, they say, each receptor cell has only one type of receptor and can only detect a small number of related molecules, and it would respond more intensely to some molecules than other.

So let's say that it's ideal for sensing molecule A, but it can also sense molecules Z and B. But when molecule A hits it, it gets a really strong sense, and then you would be able to perceive that smell really well. If it's Z or B, it still reacts, but not at the same intensity as it would if it were molecule A. All right, that's that's their their hypothesis. And so essentially you would have a lot of specialized receptor cells, lots of different types in your nasal cavity.

Otherwise you would only be able to detect us very small number of smells. But obviously we can detect a fairly wide range, not as wide as some other animals, but but pretty impressive. And they also found that three percent of human genes are coded for olfactory receptor types.

Pretty impressive when you consider it. Like again, like you were saying, Joe, we perceive smell as being not that important compared to some of our other senses, but you know from it sid or hearing, from a genetic standpoint, it's pretty important. Um. Meanwhile, Luca Turin has an alternative hypothesis and suggest that instead of a large number of specialized olfactory receptor cells, we may have fewer specialized cells, like a smaller number of specializations that can detect a

wider spectrum of odors through quantum vibration. That sounds like one of those things made up in the screenplay to explain Captain America's arm reverse the polarity, that kind of thing. So in this sense, it would be the actual vibration of the molecule itself and less about the shape of the molecule, although even Turin does not go so far as to say the molecular shape doesn't matter. The principal hypothesis is that the quantum vibration is what ultimately determines

the signal that gets sent to the brain. At any rate, a signal gets sent to the brain, and then your brain ends up interpreting what that signal actually is. That's pretty cool. But what I was actually wondering about this about the sense of smell and the future of the sense of smell, is the more we understand about our bodies and brains, is there a reason to think that we might be discovering the sense of smell is actually more important to humans than we realize. It definitely is

very influential. Oh sure, well, I mean the thing is that when it gets into your brain, it's not just your brain going like that's an orange. It's your brain going that's an orange, and I have feelings about it. Yeah, as it turns out putting it. You know, when we say it sends messages to the brain, we're not talking about it just throws a message at the brain and hopes that it gets to where it needs to go.

Those messages go to a specific location. The olfactory bulb, which is part of the limbic system limit system, has a couple of other really important parts in it, like a the campus memories, right yeah, yeah, it helps you form associations specifically, and the magdala. We've got some important parts here. These are These are all parts of the brain that we tend to to associate with things like memory, mood, emotions, the In fact, the limbic system often a lot of

people call it the emotional part of the brain. Right, So smell is right there with it. Now, don't go so far as to suggest that smell and memory are are directly entwined where they have a one to one relationship. However, smells can be associated with memory in a way that's very tightly correlated. It's not um you know, you don't

wouldn't say that a smell automatically creates a memory. But if you're creating a memory, like if you are committing something to a memory, you're creating that neural pathway for the first time, and as smells associated with it, then the next time you encounter that smell can trigger the memory. Exactly.

You've probably experienced this yourself if you smell something that you're that your grandmother specifically cooks and you had this this wonderful childhood memory of of of eating dinner with your grandparents then or you know, just just just different, different smells all the time. I can tell you, I can tell you the one of the most powerful, uh emotional reactions I have from a smell that I encountered first when I was a kid, which is the smell

of a chlorinated indoor pool. As soon as I smell that, I go back to when I was a kid taking swimming lessons for the first time. I took swimming lessons in an indoor pool at what was then Gainesville College. It's not part of the University of Georgia system. And it was a very stressful kind of traumatic experience for me when it first started. And then I ended up absolutely loving it by the time it was over. So when I encounter the smell, I actually do feel a

sense of physical apprehension. And even if I'm not, like, if if I go through any sort of gem that has that kind of like they have an indoor pool or whatever, and I just walked by, it instantly triggers that memory of five year old Jonathan, Uh, scared stiff about jumping in water that's over his head. But it's I mean, it's just it's true. It even now I am many years separated from five year old Jonathan, but it still happens. Yeah. For me, it's a charcoal grill

on a summer day takes me back to childhood. I feel I feel like I want a dill pickle. Well, that's cool, that's a very that's a very sweet memory. Yeah, it's just one of those things where like, and of course there are other smells that do this for me as as well. It's just the pool one is so like, it's just so vibrant. And even knowing that my memories of that time are not accurate, We've discussed this, how

memories are fallible. You cannot count on a memory being an exact representation of what really happened to you in some past event. Even knowing that it's still very evocative. Oh yeah, yeah, it's really hard to to separate those out. Um. But you don't have to take our word for it. No, there are actual scientific studies that have shown how how smell can affect not just memory, but our moods overall

and and our emotions. So I read about this one study that was conducted by Rutgers University psychology professor Jeannette Havevilyn Jones, and she used floral sense in an experiment in which people were to describe three life events, one in the distant past, one in their near past, and one potential event in their future, so something that could be possible down the line. And they also had to interact with the mind. Terrifying right now, they interact with

the mind. They had to interact with the mind. There there could this interaction be described as running away. It could have been, in fact, and I'll get to something that's similar to that in a second. Now that the the direction they were given was to instruct the mind to act out an emotion aociated with the memory from their distant past, so a childhood memory that was the

direction they got. So they had a they had a control room that was a neutral scent there was no scent there, and they had the experimental room that had a floral scent pumped into it. And they found that the subjects who were in the floral scented room described their memories and the possible future event with more positive

and happy language. They actually would went through all the descriptions and flagged all the words that had any kind of emotional attachment to them, And they discovered that those who were in that floral scented room were more positive and happy with their accounts, and the ones in the neutral room used less frequently they would use that language, they might use more neutral or even negative language in

some of their memories. And when it came to the interaction with the mine, they found that the participants in the floral scented room would move toward or actually touched the mind in order to instruct how to act out this emotion, whereas only fift pent of the folks in the neutral room did. Yeah. So, now, granted, of course, you know, you gotta keep in mind, like I don't know how large the sample sizes were, right, but still very interesting. And the conclusion here is that sense can

shape our moods. And here's the crazy thing. You remember I said that there was that one room that was neutral and one room that had that floral scent. Well, the floral set was actually undetectable. The scent was there, but it was below the threshold of human detection. Yeah, you don't even have to be conscious of the scent for it to affect you. And that's what I thought was amazing. These smells can be what's you know, there's

subliminal smells. You don't even know about it. So it's it's so faint as to be undetectable, and it can still affect our behavior and decision making. So another study that shows this was a Northwestern University Uh well, actually I'm sorry. Northwestern University cited the study. It was published in Psychological Science, in which subjects were presented with a neutral face. They would look at the really a series of neutral faces? Is there really such a thing as

a neutral face? If you play Dungeons and Dragons, there is a series of neutral faces, so that I assume they mean expressionless, chaotic neutral face. There's there's a there's an expressions yea, or or possibly an open screen, but at anyway, these were expressionless faces, a series of them, and you had again a control group and an experimental group.

The experimental subjects were exposed to a sub threshold scent, and that scent could either be pleasant so that was like a citrusy sort of lemony scent another subliminal scent, or it could be an unpleasant scent, which was described as being sweaty. I guess, so if you could actually smell it, it would be pretty nasty. But again it was below detectable levels, and the study on that those who breathe in the pleasant scent commented that the neutral

face was likable. They said, you know, this is a likable sort of person. They'd go through the the different faces and that be their reaction, and those who smelled the sweaty one will be less likely said it's not so likable an unpleasant person. So again the conclusion appears to be that these smells that we cannot necessarily consciously detect can still affect our moods and thus affect our

impressions of things that we see and encounter. Sure, I see where you're going, but but does that have any effect. I mean on larger issues, like like our actual decision making processes. Let me let me paint a scenario. Just this is this is going to take smell out of the equation. Let me just paint a scenario. Let's say you have had an amazing day like it has just everything has gone well for you. You're feeling good, positive about yourself, You've got great self image. Everything is. It's

just one of those days where you're just happy. It's been nothing but green lights and eyebrow compliments. That's right. Strangers on the street coming up to you offering free shrimp cocktail at some point. That's not a great day in Atlanta. Necessarily, especially on a summer day in Atlanta. You do not want shrimp cocktail. Um, but I'm saying, well iced, you know, alright, cocktail sauce. Let me get

to my point here. And anyway, you have an amazing day and at the end of that day, someone approaches you and asks if you would like to donate to a cause that you actually do support. You might be likely to actually do that because you're feeling great, You're in a very positive mood, and you want to do something. You want to pay it forward. You want to keep this positive stuff going. Now, let's say you've had the

worst day ever. It's just been awful. Everything's gone wrong, all red lights, rainy day, outside boss has chewed you out for something that was totally not your fault. Random stranger on the street offered you really bad shrimp cocktail. Nobody liked your eyebrows. No one liked your eyebrows. It's

the worst day ever. And you come home and your encounter you encounter that person and it may still be a cause that you really believe in, but your mood is so bad that you may be less likely to support it because you're kind of wrapped up in this really crappy mood you're in. And yeah, you say, you say, screw those hedgehogs. I am not donating, they're rescuing. In fact, I will kick a hedgehog if there was one in front of me, And you wouldn't really do it, but

you're thinking it because you're just in such a rotten mood. Yeah, But one of the things about that scenario you've described is that we're usually conscious enough to be able to recognize that our emotions are influencing our decision making. In a situation like that and in extremes perhaps, yes, and that was an example of extremes obvious. No, no, no, no no, I think we're going in the same direction here, So you might not donate to something that later you think, Oh,

you know, I really should have given. I was just in a bad mood. I've had a bad day. You hear people use I've had a bad day as an excuse for their behavior all the time. Yeah, you know, they realize that it changes what kind of person they are. But when we have our behavior affected by subliminal stimula, yeah, when you're unaware that there's even something affecting your behavior, you could actually be put into something like that bad

mood position without knowing you've been there. You don't recognize that you've had your behavior altered in such a way. And this is what's leading us to the power of smell and its effect on our ability to make decisions. Now, one thing about decisions is a lot of our decisions are based upon our memories. Right. We we remember previous events that are at least in some way analogous to our current situation, and then we end up making a decision based on that and it may not be something

that's directly from our past. It may be a story we heard from a friend. So for example, let's say I'm out looking for a place to eat and I happen to see a restaurant, or maybe even I'm just walking around and I decide I want a particular type of food because I'm smelling it, but I don't even realize it, and I think back to a story of friend told about having horrible food poisoning with this one particular type of food, and then I'm like, oh no,

maybe I don't want to go there. It In part of it, it means that the smells might trigger certain memories, which in a in turn can affect our current decisions. And maybe we have a spectrum of memories about that particular subject, but the smell is triggering specific memories within that spectrum and not triggering other memories. Thus it's influencing us to one choice over the other choices. That's kind

of an interesting way to think about it. But just imagine that you're in a situation where you have to make a decision and you have several choices ahead of you. In your past, you've got plenty of experience that would have a pretty comp lex decision making process. But because of a certain scent, you are leaning towards just a couple of those memories, and that's what influences you to make your choice. The choice isn't even up to you,

it's up to the damn smell and the memory. Now, like we were saying, moods also affect our decision making process. You know, I used the two extreme examples, but that would end up causing us not necessarily to to definitively make one choice over the other. I'm not trying to suggest that free will doesn't exist and we are all whims to the external influences around us, but that's probably true there they are at least influential, right, And I've even seen some people who suggest, hey, as long as

you're aware of it, it's okay. But as we've already established, you don't have to be aware of it, right. It can be below that threshold and still affect you, So being aware of it is not really that's moot at this point. Not if someone's pumping enough scent for you to pick up on it. Sure you could say, oh, I smell that, but can be like, hey, realtor you're totally baking chocolate chip cookies or at least have a candle it right, So then I'll end up buying this

house then that I don't want. I think they have a spritzer can of chocolate chip cookie smell. Yeah, man, I need that. Let me look it up, right? We should we should do another We should do another show about how how that stuff works, because that is fascinating. We actually could. I think that would be a great video, honestly. Okay, so we've got an idea now, chocolate chip cookie spray. I'm finding it back. That's just awful. Now wait if

that actually sprays chocolate chip cookies, it's awesome. I I don't need air sool eyes chocolate chip cookies. You do, because that way you get a baking sheet. You just go. I do not believe in food coming in spray cans. This calls itself cologne spray, but it's chocolate chip cookie by Demeter for women. I'm looking online at any ray. Imperceptible odors can influence us, so awareness is not really a factor. Right. We might end up being influenced in

ways that we cannot be aware of. We're incapable of it. Where our consciousness cannot detect that level. It makes you wonder how much we've got corporate scientists doing a secret little experiments to study exactly how they can tweak our behavior in the store. There are certainly rumors about that going on. Well, yeah, I mean like there's there's the story about uh. And I should say this is a story that I haven't corroborated. I have not actually done

the research. But the story about Disney pumping in the smell of fresh baked cookies in Main Street, USA to give that kind of home feeling as you're walking down now, grant, I imagine that's a perceptible level of cookie smell, and not necessarily the below the threshold, because there are a lot of other smells you're gonna encounter in a in a group of people that large, especially if you have to be going to say the Magic Kingdom and Walt

Disney World Florida and the middle of summer, You're gonna get a lot of smells. That's all I'm saying. Um, some block for example, as a as a not totally gross version, Yeah, yeah, some pleasant smells or at least neutral smells, right, But there are plenty of examples of people using smells, whether perceptible or not, to try and

influence people's behaviors. Marketers are using it a lot. In fact, they you know you'll hear about We mentioned the real estate agents using that cookie smell or baked bread smell to kind of create a sense of home when you when they're showing off a house to a prospective buyer. What about retail, like, if you actually go in a store, what do you make somebody smell to get them to

buy your junk Nike? Actually, they funded a study to look into this, and the study found that by pumping in a floral scent into a store, you would inspire customers to buy more shoes, and more more expensive shoes. So you go into a shoe store too. Unrelated statements, No, I was specifically yes, Yes, I had, I had. I had one specific point following Joe, I'm glad you. I'm glad you make the observation Lauren, because that is important.

Lawrens just trying to get some free Nikes. I you know I wouldn't not take I'm gonna have to parse that sentence in a second. I get all my Nikes from the dark. Webb explains why you always get like two that are are for the left foot. The swooshes backwards at any rate. Nike found, according to the or at least the people who performed the study, found that this floral scent would inspire people to spend more money. And in fact, that's something that I've seen repeated in

another example. Although I hastened to add I could not find the specific source of this fact, so it could be apocryphal. But the share gossip at me. It was it was that the Las Vegas Hilton, which is now called Westgate. It was Las Vegas Hilton, then it was l v H. That was Las Vegas Hotel, now it's Westgate.

Uh found that pumping in floral sense encouraged gambling. It actually, uh it resulted in gambler spending fifty more time at slot machines when the sense were present, So the idea being apparently that it made people happy and motivated to

continue gambling, to continue plunking coins into slot machines. You know, as we learn more about how smells influence our brains for positive or negative purposes, or maybe for a purpose that you know, you might be conflicted about, like would you call it positive or negative that you can make

somebody more likely to buy something. It makes you wonder how fine tuned we can get with the way we manage people's behavior through sense, and if it will be a thing in the future for you know, people with a very solid base of smell, you know, behavioral science based on smells, that they're going to be pumping artificial sense out all over the place to try to get you to behave the way they want, you know, like like I, I want to make someone feel happy but

in a slightly self conscious way and therefore need to buy way more stuff that will help them be better. So, yeah, the way we imagine this happening today is like in physical spaces like stores. Okay, so you you understand that maybe when you go into a hardware store, they're going to encourage you to buy an extra set of two by fours and and an extra chainsaw and a wheelbarrow by pumping in the smell of flowers or baking chocolate

chip cookies. They might have a good stock of science they're working on and they know that this gets results. But I wonder how much this can be capitalized on once we have artificial smell generating media devices once we have that people are working on that thing. Well, I mean people have been working on that kind of thing for years with ridiculous junk like the smell O Vision

or the sense O Rama. That was that virtual reality thing that would blow sense of like things like like evergreen sense in your face as you were looking at evergreen footage in this video screen. Sure, and and I guess a lot of like like the rides of Disney World have that kind of thing, and then some of the epcut stuff too, like the smell of charcoal or oranges and um, the big golf ball. Yeah, man, you all really know about your Disney sense. I've been been

there a lot. Okay, Well anyway, No, so this isn't exactly anything new. It's just more that, yes, people are still trying to create electronic media of devices that generate smells. And one of the most recent versions of this was something I was reading about the other day. I was trying to make sure this wasn't some kind of elaborate April Fools Day joke or hoax, but I checked the dates on these articles that they were not April one,

So I think this is all for real. It's a project that as far as I can tell, is for real, and it's led by the biomedical engineer David Edwards of Harvard. He's been promoting a device called the O phone, or in the most recent the O phone, or the Phone duo or in the most recent incarnation, I think it's just been reduced to the OH notes odor So I

think so, yeah, oder phone, Yes, it would be. This would be an electronic device that supplies you with tiny bursts of carefully engineered since which are contained on things called OH chips. There were a few articles about this last year because they launched an indie go go campaign to try to get some funding. I don't think they achieved their funding goal, but as far as I can tell, they're still trying to go through with this project and whatever you want to call it, O phone, OH notes.

The general idea is that you've got a device that supplies you with these engineered packets of smell that can be sort of tagged as metadata on top of other things. So the original idea I read about was that you might take a picture with your phone and then send somebody that picture with this app, and then with the app, you would be able to tag the picture with some

scent combination. So if you took a picture of a field of roses, you could include a smell that was a floral smell, perhaps even the rose smell, and that would be what would admit on the mobile device or whatever it was that the other person is using to access the thing you sent or more complicated lee And if it's a field of roses, for example, it could be that rose smell plus a little bit of like a grass shrubbery smell, plus maybe some like earth smell, Yeah,

plus the smell of clowns with chainsaws in the background. I was about to say this, This to me sounds like it could potentially lead to a whole new level of trolling, Like just just you just put the most foul sense and and pair it was something that looks pleasant, beautiful. Yeah, and then of course that trick only will really work

on somebody you know, five six times. Yeah. Now, So the version of this product they were talking about last year had it had sort of a smelling station, so it was known as the O Phone Duo, and it would be this kind of cylindrical pipe like object that would connect to your you know, your smartphone, because obviously your smartphone can't make smells at you, So this station would have to can make a burning electronic smell. But that's about it, and that's very brief smell o zone.

This station would have to be there to release the smell. And in the end, I think they might be able to create a device like this could that could have a very wide range of different smells that could pull from because it was talking about how it can have lots of tiny little chambers that release different smells and different combinations to create sort of a symphony of aromas. And to what extent can we imagine that devices like these that generate smells could help further control us, even

without us going out into physical spaces. So let's say, uh, campaign ad on on the YouTube video you're watching shows you the face of the political opponent, and they give you a bad person smell from your device, or you are online doing some online shopping and they pump that floral scent into your home or your or you know, the tray in car wherever you're sitting while you're doing your online shopping or whatever it is. First of all, I welcome the floral set being pumped into the train.

I welcome that now or in a less marketing conspiracy theory kind of way, that could be fascinating for for adding yet another dimension to home movies. Sure, I mean, and I think that's why these kind of devices would be envisioned in the first place. Like you can look at a picture of somebody's somebody's nice meal on Instagram and it actually releases meal smell. I think, I think the smell of that meal and not just a generic

meal smell. The interesting thing I mentioned to Joe before this podcast, in my mind is that at least from a behavioral standpoint, it appears, and if we're talking about subliminal smells where you can't detect it consciously, it appears that as long as it's something that is that you would associate with positive outcomes, it doesn't matter what the smell is, right, And if you associate with negative outcomes,

it doesn't matter what the smell is. So in other words, you wouldn't necessarily have to have a smell that accompanies the picture of the meal. If all you want to do is inspire the person to go out and get that meal, you would just have to have something positive.

I was talking about more as an entertainment value oh sure, Yeah, if it's perceptible, then obviously it would just be weird to start getting like mixed messages of one sense telling you one thing and everything else telling you something else. That just be it would just be disconcerting, or at least at least you'd be like, who decided to do

it like that? So when we were talking about the possibility of having these devices, one of the limiting factors is how many canisters of chemicals do you have to create the various sense and you know, and what would be the bare minimum number of canisters you would need to create a wide array of sense. And my argument was that if it's the subliminal type thing, you won't

really just need good and bad. It's really now I am a gend that bad is a lot easier to achieve than good because you can never be certain what kind of association someone is going to have with the scent that you generate. It is possible that, even if it's a subliminal scent, you know, the person is not conscious of it, that they have a memory associated with that scent that is negative and for most people it's positive.

You're not gonna get a positive outcome, uh, with negative, But with stinky stuff, it's a little easier, right, because it's just unpleasant. Um. Now this also, I also think that this is a way of suggesting, uh that we should really work in improving air quality and uh the type of sense that we encounter in public spaces, because not only is it more pleasant, but it actually positively affects people's mood, which in turn positively affects people's decisions.

And therefore, if you are in an environment that is less pleasant, it's unpleasant, then you could be affecting people's moods and affect people's decisions. Not to go so far as to say good smells and bad smells are either going to uh eliminate or encourage crime, but it certainly can influence people. Sure, I mean yeah, could could you make a city a nicer city to live in by making the inhabitants of the city nicer people by making them smell flowers? Even if you're not making them nicer people,

you might be setting them up for success. That's the way I kind of think of it, because ultimately, again I don't think free will is completely taken out of this picture. Obviously, if someone is determined to choose a h a course of action that would have a negative impact on somebody else. Pumping fresh bait cookie smell to them is probably not going to change their mind. However, just as a general thing, it might be a very

kind of hands off way of encouraging more p centrin quility. Yeah, you know, I mean but this, this again starts to creep into a conversation that we're going to have later on about the various influences we can have that can kind of influence our behavior, perhaps even to the point where we are encouraged to take one course of action over any other course of action, and what are the

ethical implications of that. That's a much bigger discussion that we're going to have pretty soon, So stay tuned because we've got a lot to say about that. But this has been really cool. It's been a fun topic to talk about. I think this was one that I had, well, Joey, you and I had both talked about. I don't know who specifically mentioned the smell. Somehow, somehow we brought up smells and I was like, could we make an episode out of that? And then the question became could we

make a good episode? And I'm not sure I hope. So, yeah, I hope this was worth it. Well. I gotta say I had a lot of fun looking into this and learned a lot. I mean, just the idea that something beneath the threshold of consciousness could have that big of an impact upon a mood, uh, you know, maybe not so big as to definitely determine your actions, but certainly to sway you. Uh. That to me was fascinating and

honestly a little a little unnerving. Yeah, to think that you might not be as in control as you believe you are. Uh. And we're going to talk more about that too. So, guys, if you have suggestions for future topics, maybe you've got questions, comments, Maybe there's a childhood smell, something that just brings you back to a specific memory and you want to share that with us, we'd love

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