Jonas Olofsson
Appearances
Global News Podcast
First deaths as wildfires wreak havoc in LA
We hypothesized that people who are very disgusted by body order, that they would also have this kind of authoritarian disposition. And that's what we've found.
Global News Podcast
First deaths as wildfires wreak havoc in LA
The sense of smell is among the senses that most people would lose if they had to lose one. And a lot of people would actually lose their sense of smell rather than losing their phones or their pinky toe, which I think would be really a mistake because the sense of smell is so important to us.
Global News Podcast
First deaths as wildfires wreak havoc in LA
When we enjoy food, for example, most of that flavor comes from smells that are released in the mouth and travel through our throat and up our to the nasal cavity. We think of it as a taste, but it's really smell. So if you try to pinch your nose next time you have a meal, you wouldn't want to do that ever again, because the food experience would be quite terrible.
Global News Podcast
First deaths as wildfires wreak havoc in LA
And you see also that people who lose their sense of smells, they are more vulnerable to depression. And that tells you something about how the sense of smell kind of connects us with the world around us. So I think that's like a more existential side of the sense of smell that people don't really realise.
Global News Podcast
First deaths as wildfires wreak havoc in LA
Yeah, so there's a longstanding notion in social psychology that kind of authoritarianism is essentially a way to avoid disease, to avoid being infected. So you want to keep your distance. You want society to be very rigid and different groups of people don't interact with each other so much. You have like a close knitted circle. You prioritize family and your close friends and you...
Global News Podcast
First deaths as wildfires wreak havoc in LA
You don't want a lot of foreigners coming to your country, etc. So there's a cluster of values that can be and has been linked to this notion of contagion. And the sense of smell is a way for us to avoid things that can make us sick. And that's why the sense of smell is linked to disgust so much. When we smell something that we don't like, we...
Global News Podcast
First deaths as wildfires wreak havoc in LA
We are disgusted by it and we avoid it very strongly. So we hypothesize that people who are very disgusted by body order, that they would also have this kind of authoritarian disposition. And that's what we've found now in a number of different studies. And this correlation is found all over the world, actually. So we don't.
Global News Podcast
First deaths as wildfires wreak havoc in LA
We've done a global study on this effect and found that it is true basically everywhere you go.
Global News Podcast
First deaths as wildfires wreak havoc in LA
I love the smells of my family members. Those are hard to beat, obviously. But I love coffee smell, coffee and pastries. Cinnamon is popular in Sweden and the cardamom.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
So this has been debated and for a long time, many people assumed that the human sense of smell was atrophied or underdeveloped. But recently, there have been efforts to try to combine everything that we know about how faint smells can humans detect. versus non-human animals, and then compare the two.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
But as far as we know, humans are only outclassed by the dog in terms of how many molecules we can detect at a very low concentration. So only the dog is clearly superior to us. And so it's unfortunate to us that we interact with dogs a lot, so we compare our noses to theirs. They are perhaps the outlier, whereas we have a very strong sense of smell, better than most animals that we have studied.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
So the sense of smell is much better than people typically give it credit for.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
Yeah, so odors are basically molecules that are released from a type of surface and they are airborne. So they have to be of a certain molecular weight in order to be carried by the air. They can't be too heavy. But they are carried in the air and they are part of the air that we are sniffing and inhaling when we breathe in through our nose.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
So on the top of the nasal cavity we have millions of little nervous cells so that the nervous system is actually exposed in the nasal cavity and there these molecules interact directly with the sensors on the nerve cells and the nerve cells
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
communicate they send an electric signal through little holes at the roof of the the nasal cavity and the base of the skull actually has little perforations and those those little holes that's where the neurons travel up to the brain and from there all kinds of weird and exciting things happen when the brain is supposed to tease apart very complex signals that are
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
coming from the nose so that we are able to to tell apart different smells to remember them to have an emotional reaction to them all these things take place in the the central parts of our brain one of the things i think people wonder about the sense of smell is that we smell things
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
Yeah, so it's believed that the most fundamental function that the sense of smell has is for us to detect chemical hazards or nutritious and pleasurable food sources at a distance. So we can navigate away from certain things and towards other things, and that helps us to survive. This is found in very simple organisms. It's called chemotaxis.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
That's when a little amoeba swims towards sucrose, if you put it in a little dish. So it's a very basic kind of attraction and revulsion mechanism. And that helps the organism to survive. So I think that's kind of built into our brains and our genetics. But then...
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
What we have as mammals, we have a great capacity to learn, to learn to associate which are the smells that made us sick, which are the smells that turned out to be really nutritious and good food. And then we carry those memories with us. And when we smell something, our emotional reactions are to a large extent shaped by those prior experiences and emotional reactions that we had before.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
Yeah, so a prior experience is one thing, but the individual receptor genetics, so those are the genes that are expressed in us as individuals that create those receptor cells that enable us to pick up certain molecules, those differ to a large extent from person to person, and that can have consequences for how strongly do we pick up on certain notes.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
so for example someone's body odor might smell very strong and unpleasant to one person whereas for a different person it's it's okay or even even very nice but there was one interesting study in iceland so they have this local tradition of of eating fermented shark which smells very stinky to most people but those who perceive
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
this smell to be less strong, they might be able to sort of overcome this smell in order to eat food that might keep them alive. And so a particular version of this gene that makes this smell less strong is overrepresented in the Icelandic population, which has been heavily dependent on a fish diet. So I find that absolutely fascinating.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
There are odors that are on a cultural level, that are disliked by all different cultures. But within those cultures, there are people who find these odors okay. So within each culture, there are individuals who have a completely different opinion about the smells. So it goes to show that... The sense of smell is very individual.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
There might be general trends that are common across cultures, but within each culture, there are certain people who might just have, for biological or historical reasons, they might have a very different opinion of certain smells that other people find repulsing.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
There is actually one of the first studies that I did was on pregnant women and their sense of smell. And one of the odors that we exposed them to was Chanel No. 5, the perfume. And... Most of the women in the sample, they strongly disliked this smell. I thought that they would really like it. It's an old perfume, but they really disliked this odor.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
So it's really unpredictable what people will like and dislike. It's quite fascinating how different people react.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
Yeah, they thought it was kind of overwhelming and too sweet and flowery and artificial, all these things that they... But I suppose other people might have a completely different view. Otherwise, the perfume wouldn't have been so popular. So it really has a lot to do with, I think, cultural values, experiences, these personal tastes that we develop over our lives.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
But because the emotional qualities of smell... are so strong that makes us think that they must be innate. That's what I think is going on. Because we have this strong emotional kind of dimension to smells, we tend to believe that it cannot be learned. But when you expose people to smells, you see that the more they are exposed to it, the less unpleasant these odors tend to be.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
If they are unpleasant to begin with, we can get used to a lot of smells that we don't find acceptable at first.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
Yeah, and that's also one of the basic functions of smell is that it alerts us to new smells. But once we have sort of understood what it is and we have attended to these smells, they fade into the background. And that's probably because... We don't really need to attend to them anymore. We know that they are not dangerous. You know, it's the change in the chemical environment.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
That is what we need to be alerted to. So our noses get tired and our attention span, our attention moves away to other things very quickly when it comes to smells. So people smell.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
Many people feel that a pleasant body odor is a very desirable characteristic. And in women especially, an attractive body odor is as important or even more important than good looks. So it certainly is a big factor when it comes to finding a partner and romantic attachment and such. Those people who lose their sense of smell, they often report that their love lives suffer.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
So they don't feel as connected to their partner on an emotional level as they did before. And oftentimes they might not be aware that it's a sense of smell that kind of brought about this close emotional tie between them. So the sense of smell is very powerful in this regard. In surveys on U.S.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
college students, for example, women tend to say that a good body odor is more preferable than good looks. For men, the looks are more important, but for women, the smell is more important.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
Yeah, it is very individual. And I think it's also interesting to what you said that we don't really talk about it very often. It's really hard to communicate and talk about smells and try to put it into words what we are experiencing. So a lot of it...
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
kind of affects us in an in an unconscious way so part of my efforts is to kind of make people aware and to talk more about smells and to attend to smells and and i think that will kind of lead to a better understanding of who we are and why we do the things we do one of the things about the sense of smell that i
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
Yeah, many people have at least a few of those childhood memories that can be instantly triggered by a certain smell. And yeah, it's not really well known why this happens. But we know that the sense of smell is fully developed already when we are born. So we are born with a really keen sense of smell. And that makes us...
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
probably able to encode new memories related to smell before we are able to do the same with other senses. And that is maybe why the sense of smell can bring back these old memories. Other sensory events, they tend to bring back memory from the teenage years or young adulthood. For example, our favorite music is usually the music that we loved when we were teenagers.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
But with smell, it goes earlier than that. So childhood memories are evoked by the smells.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
Yeah, it is, unfortunately. So a lot of the people who have smell impairments, they have that because of wear and tear over our lives. So as I mentioned, these olfactory receptors are exposed in the nasal cavity. So they are exposed to all kinds of things, viruses, etc., that we breathe in and that can have harmful effects. And even if the
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
The biological system is very good at regeneration and recovering from these insults. It's rarely as good as it was when we were young. So it's a normal consequence of aging. And unfortunately,
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
unlike the sense of vision we don't have anything comparable to to eyeglasses to compensate for for these impairments so there is no technology yet for fully recovering or compensating for an impaired sense of smell is it true that women have a better sense of smell overall Not quite, actually. It's a notion that was present already in ancient times.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
Aristotle wrote that women had a better sense of smell than men. But modern research hasn't really brought that out. So if we test men and women on really faint odors, men and women tend to perform similarly. So we can detect odors at the same concentration. But when we ask participants to remember the smells or to describe them with words, women tend to do better.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
So they are more able to cognitively elaborate and encode the odors in memory relative to the men. So it's both yes and no. They are better in some ways, but the nose is as powerful for men as in women.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
Yeah, so we know that being out in nature and smelling the natural smells of the forest or the ocean or those things can have a strong impact on our moods and have positive health benefits. But it doesn't really work in an automatic way. So we can't just...
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
you know pump certain smells into into the ventilation system at the workplace and then people will be more productive i think it has to do with the context in which the orders are presented and the the people who are perceiving them so there is no real shortcut i think to to boosting productivity and and i think a lot of the aromatherapy effects they are due to the fact that people
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
put themselves in a mindful state and they use odors that they like and that they believe have these potent effects on their moods. And so there is a type of placebo effect going on as well. And people can use that for their benefit. So I'm not a believer in using odors too much in the workplace. It might actually backfire.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
If you have an unpleasant work environment, adding smells to it might make things worse, I think.
Something You Should Know
Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You
Those people who lose their sense of smell often report that their love lives suffer, so they don't feel as connected to their partner. And oftentimes they might not be aware that it's the sense of smell that brought about this close emotional tie between them.