Finally some progress towards smellovision.
Not joking, my mom has asked me every year since I became a "tech person" when I am going to make smellovision. This is perfect for her.
She should be careful what she wishes for.
We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
101–110 of 198 posts
Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
#102I wonder if this makes you smell "laurax" or "olfactory white" if it glitches and triggers every receptor site simultaneously
Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume the reasons are more visceral than prudish. I don't think I would want to know what a porno set would smell like. This is coming from a place of physical discontent, not moral discontent.
It doesnt have to smell like the porno set. They could choose any smell that stimulates arousal.
For some reason this sent my train of thought towards the "people who think their shit doesn't stink" expression.
Is it still shitposting if it actually smells nice?
Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
#104I wonder if this makes you smell "laurax" or "olfactory white" if it glitches and triggers every receptor site simultaneously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_white
That's a really interesting concept! The wiki page right now ends in "example of a combination of smells that neutralise each other", which makes me wonder if the "olfactory white" combinations are actually tuned to neutralize? I suspect what we're hitting is a bunch of receptors, and the brain is interpretting it as a common strong and evolutionarily important smell (which I assume has stronger pathways by default).
Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
#105I'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.
Super interesting! That would make sense, because a lot of the nose is presumably dedicated to smelling evolutionarily-relevant smells, most of which are "smells bad, avoid this". The method is very crude right now, but maybe with more fine-grained targetting we could better tune the smell profile.
Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
#106That anyone would direct a device towards their brain, intending the device to cause a physical impact on it, is amazing to me.
Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
#107> 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?
Certainly! We didn't get a chance to test it on more people before we had to take it apart, but we thought the result was too cool to share. Would love to see other folks run with the idea!
Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
#108Reminds me of the vibration theory of olfaction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction
Woah I didn't know about that theory, that's really interesting! If I understand correctly, it's that the ligand needs to both fit "physically" and also have the right vibrational mode to have high binding affinity / trigger the receptor? Sounds like the relevant frequencies would be in IR range, or roughly 10-100 terahertz. We're at 300 kHz, so 9 orders of magnitude lower, so we're likely not activating the receptors directly with that mechanism. But, maybe the acoustic radiation force from the ultrasound gives existing molecules in the air enough energy to increase the coupling? And nobody seems to really know how ultrasound neurostimulation really works, so who knows—maybe something similar even happens with neurotransmitters in cortex...
Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
#109I find it incredible that the same olfactory activation patterns mapped to the the SAME smells in both subjects.
Sorry it's unclear in the post, they weren't exactly the same! The numbers reported were on Lev, and we swept them around that range for me (Albert). But we didn't take down the exact values, so unfortunately I don't know how similar the maps were. iirc they were pretty different.
Re: We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
#110I cant wait for the day when the perfume and food shops in the mall use this for truly targeted advertisement. Cue rise of ultrasound-proof hats and lawsuits by people who report feeling sick due to such ads.