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posted by janrinok on Friday July 03 2015, @08:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the smells-fishy dept.

Each of us has, in our nose, about six million smell receptors of around four hundred different types. The distribution of these receptors varies from person to person -- so much so that each person's sense of smell may be unique. In research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Weizmann Institute scientists report on a method of precisely characterizing an individual's sense of smell, which they call an "olfactory fingerprint."

The implications of this study reach beyond the sense of smell alone, and range from olfactory fingerprint-based early diagnosis of degenerative brain disorders to a non-invasive test for matching donor organs.

The method is based on how similar or different two odors are from one another. In the first stage of the experiment, volunteers were asked to rate 28 different smells according to 54 different descriptive words, for example, "lemony," or "masculine." The experiment, led by Dr. Lavi Secundo, together with Dr. Kobi Snitz and Kineret Weissler, all members of the lab of Prof. Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute's Neurobiology Department, developed a complex, multidimensional mathematical formula for determining, based on the subjects' ratings, how similar any two odors are to one another in the human sense of smell. The strength of this formula, according to Secundo, is that it does not require the subjects to agree on the use and applicability of any given verbal descriptor. Thus, the fingerprint is odor dependent but descriptor and language independent.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Saturday July 04 2015, @11:50AM

    by Justin Case (4239) on Saturday July 04 2015, @11:50AM (#204992) Journal

    I have a very limited "smell vocabulary". Usually when others report smelling something, I smell nothing. Among the smells I can identify:

    Smoke
    Perfume (AKA drenched in way too much perfume)
    Hospital
    Sewer
    Rotten

    Yeah, most of these smells are Not Good. So, if I can smell you, you probably stink, and horribly.

    I think most people communicate, subconsciously, through smell. I suspect it has to do with attraction and arousal. I'm missing all those messages, and I don't know what I'm "putting out there".

    Do I need deodorant? I don't know, and nobody will tell me, because they're being "polite". But if I did, how would I know which brand is working?

    It seems like an unrecognized handicap. At least, any time I've mentioned it to doctors etc. they just kinda shrug.

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  • (Score: 2) by jimshatt on Saturday July 04 2015, @11:10PM

    by jimshatt (978) on Saturday July 04 2015, @11:10PM (#205138) Journal
    Olfactorily challenged. Me too, but not as bad as you are, it seems. It's also a matter of valuating or applying some emotion or sense of delight or disgust to a smell, which I don't usually do. So when my wife is retching because of some smell, I just go "oh yeah, rotten eggs, I smell that! (yay)"