In the sense of smell it is not known to what extent the sensory perception, in particular the perception of the most pleasant smellwhether founded on universal principles, dictated by culture or simply a matter of personal taste, therefore to address this problem, scientists asked individuals from 9 different non-Western cultures, from hunter-gatherer to urban dwelling, to classify monomolecular odorants from what smelled more pleasant to less pleasant.
“Cultures around the world classify different smells in a similar way, regardless of where they come from, but odor preferences have a personal, if not cultural, component”
he has declared Artin Arshamianresearcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience Karolinska Institutet, and author of a new study published in Current Biology.
The study recruited noses from all over the world with the help of an international team that carried out its investigations both under experimental conditions and in the field; the subjects taking part in the experiment and consequently the owners of those noses came from a wide range of backgroundsincluding some indigenous groups who had very little exposure to odors and foods outside their own culture.
“We wanted to examine whether people all over the world have the same perception of smell and the same types of smell, or if it is something that is learned culturally”
Arshamian explained, who then later added:
“Traditionally it has been seen as cultural, but we can show that culture has very little to do with it“.
How the most pleasant smell was determined
In total, to understand how the most pleasant smell assignment worked, 235 people were tested to classify a range of odorsincluding those outside their lived “olfactory experience”, a term used by Arshamian to describe the cacophony of smells that surround our individual lifestyles.
The ranking of odors based on pleasantness crowned a winner for universal appeal: vanilla. This is not to say that vanilla was the most pleasant smell for each participant, but it was the one most universally classified as quite pleasant.
At the other end of the scale, something called isovaleric acid was classified as the universally least favored odorthis is found in foods such as soy milk and cheese, but it is also part of the “scent” of foot sweat.
The results seem to show that globally there is a degree of universal acceptance as to which smells are good and which bad, but there are individual differences within each group of “olfactory experience”, the researchers believe that these disagreements between the groups have probably in part to do with the molecular structure (~ 41%) but they are more heavily influenced (~ 54%) from learning or from our genetic makeup.
“Now we know there is one universal perception of smell which is guided by the molecular structure and this explains why we like or dislike a certain smell. The next step is to investigate why this is so by linking this knowledge to what happens in the brain when we smell a particular smell. “
Arshamian concluded.
A victorious day for the molecular odor profile of vanilla, then, but there is still work to be done to establish what these “pleasant” smells are actually doing to our brains.
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