What’s that smell?
Previous claims that people can distinguish over one trillion scents appear unjustified.
Scientists are interested in the number of colors, sounds and smells we can distinguish because this information can shed light onto how our brains process these senses both in health and disease. It is relatively straightforward to determine how many colors we can see or sounds we can hear because these stimuli are well defined by physical properties such as wavelength. We know the range of wavelengths that the eye can see or the ear can hear, and we can also understand how two such stimuli (e.g., red and blue) are arranged perceptually (think of a color wheel). It is harder, however, to do the same for smell because most ‘olfactory stimuli’ consist of mixtures of different odor molecules. Moreover, we understand much less about how olfactory stimuli are arranged perceptually.
In 2014 researchers at Rockefeller University reported that humans can distinguish more than one trillion smells from one another. To calculate this number the researchers tested the ability of human subjects to discriminate between mixtures of different odor molecules. Each mixture consisted of 10, 20 or 30 molecules selected from a chemical library of 128 different odor molecules. Since each mixture of 10 molecules could contain any 10 of the 128 molecules, more than 200 trillion combinations were possible; the number of possible combinations for the 20- and 30-molecule mixtures were even higher.
The aim of the experiment was to identify — by sampling from this very large number of combinations — the number of molecules that two mixtures could have in common and still be distinguishable to the typical person. The Rockefeller team used this number and a geometrical analogy to conclude that humans could discriminate at least 1.72 trillion odors, which was much higher than expected from previous reports and anecdotes.
Now Markus Meister and Richard Gerkin and Jason Castro separately report that the claims made in the Rockefeller study are unsupported because of flaws in the design of the analytical framework used to make sense of the data. In particular, Meister reports that there are flaws in the mathematical methods used to infer the potential number of all smells that humans can discriminate from the numbers of experimental samples tested. He also applies the Rockefeller approach to a well-understood sensory system — the vision system — and finds that it predicts that humans should be able to discriminate an infinite number of colors: however, it is widely agreed that humans can only discriminate several million colors.
Gerkin and Castro further report that the results are extremely sensitive to some parameters of the experimental and analytical design, such as the number of subjects tested, whereas the results of a robust analysis would not be so sensitive to such factors. By modestly varying any of these parameters it is possible to obtain almost any value for the number of smells that can be discriminated. Moreover, the geometrical analogy used set an upper bound on the final answer, rather than a lower bound: in other words, even assuming that the rest of the analysis was robust, the result should have been that humans can discriminate ‘no more than’ 1.72 trillion smells rather than ‘at least’.
To find out more
Read the eLife research papers on which this story is based: “On the dimensionality of odor space” (July 7, 2015) and “The number of olfactory stimuli that humans can discriminate is still unknown” (July 7, 2015).
eLife is an open-access journal that publishes outstanding research in the life sciences and biomedicine.
