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We Induced Smells With Ultrasound

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Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound

#51

I find it incredible that the same olfactory activation patterns mapped to the the SAME smells in both subjects.

I had the same thought - I guess it's similar to that idea that if you had someone else's eyes, you might not perceive specific colours to be the same?

But actually it sort of makes sense since (from what I understand) is stimulating an external interface (the receptors), so you're mimicing what the effect a smell would have on you rather than the electrical signal created by the response to a stimulus?

Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound

#53
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This is exceptionally cool! It looks like this post isn’t getting much love though. I’ll see if I can get this post added to the second chance pool[1] and get it added to the front page! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

Added! Thanks for requesting this. All: if you seen a particularly good submission that has fallen through the cracks, please email hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look and maybe put it in the second-chance pool ( https://news.ycombinator.com/pool , explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 ), so it will get a random re-upment on HN's front page. (Yes, it's permissible to request this for your ow…

Wow good to know, thank you guys!

Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound

#56
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I'd maybe make a hypothesis that a large portion of the space is "bad" smelling stuff: smoke or garbage. When people had covid-induced parosmia, it almost always seemed to be bad smelling stuff.

Still have it, intermittently. A sort of nameless-but-familiar "chemical" smell that comes and goes, along with any sense of taste. That is, I have bad days with no taste, just a chemical smell. Other days I have a pretty good sense of smell, generally with a good sense of taste. Intriguingly some of the really unpleasant smells never get through to me - I could probably work at a sewage works now. Worryingly I have…

This is something I'm still testing, so take it with a bucket of salt, but I've found that exposing myself to very strong samples of things that I was unable to smell made something click again and I started to smell them again. Seems like something in there needs to be retrained to odors.

Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound

#57

> Different focal spots corresponded to different smells, which we’ve replicated first-try on two people and validated with a blind trial. So, N=2 and the people in question are co-authors. I'm not in this business, but isn't this too... early to publish?

It’s just a blog post. No academic is going to read it as more than a very promising early result.

The issue is that lay people read every paper or post as if it were a final proclamation. They’re not. Even a peer reviewed paper on the cover of Science or Nature is still not “proof” of anything, science doesn’t produce positive confirmation. It produces evidence that taken together suggest one prior is more likely than another.

Bayes Rule is very intuitive. We update the prior by the likelihood of the evidence under a given prior divided by the likelihood of the evidence. That’s all it is.

Unfortunately, there is a very strong motive to flag plant. Academia is a water full of sharks.

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