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Our Smell Universe

Scientific American - Posted: October 21st, 2012, 2:43pm EDT

Smell is notoriously subjective and hard to define. Odors can be perceived differently by different people depending on genetics, culture, past experience, the environment, and whether theyve had a really bad sinus infection or not. Even worse, the same person can perceive the same smell differently at different times, depending on how the smell is described and other sensory fluctuations.Leslie Vosshalls Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at Rockefeller University studies how complex behaviors are influenced by the chemical senses in organisms ranging from mosquitoes to humans. In order to better understand how human odor perception varies, both within individuals at different times and between different people, the lab asked nearly 400 New Yorkers to describe and rate the intensity and pleasantness of 66 different smells, at the same time collecting demographic data (significantly more diverse than the typical study of undergraduate psychology students) as well as data about their eating habits and perfume usage, finding many instances of variability in how people perceive smells. The lab recently published their extensive survey titled An olfactory demography of a diverse metropolitan population in the open-access journal BMC Neuroscience. Theyve also made their data freely available (you can download the huge excel file here ) for further analysis or data-mining. a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=our-smell-universe[More]/a

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