“To smell again, perchance to learn better” would be a poetical way to speak of this study about teaching sleeping children in Germany how to read and write better English: “How Odor Cues Help to Optimize Learning During Sleep in a Real Life-Setting,” Franziska Neumann, Vitus Oberhauser, and Jürgen Kornmeier, Scientific Reports, vol. 10, no. […]
Tag: odor
Peppermint Odor in Sports
Although few organized sports focus on the smell of peppermint, a study published almost two decades ago zeroed in on the practice. The study is: “Enhancing Athletic Performance Through the Administration of Peppermint Odor,” Bryan Raudenbush, Nathan Corley, and William Eppich, Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, vol.23, 2001, pp. 156-60. The authors, at Wheeling […]
Smell and Laugh, Tickled Rats
This study tells of a new (and perhaps the first) advance in the effort to explore the relationship between rats and laughter and odor: “Odour Conditioning of Positive Affective States: Rats Can Learn to Associate an Odour with Being Tickled,” Vincent Bombail, Nathalie Jerôme, Ho Lam, Sacha Muszlak, Simone L. Meddle, Alistair B. Lawrence, and […]
Some Kinds of Coffee Are More Fragrantly Attractive to Ants
Humans are not the only animals that (in many cases) are attracted by the smell of coffee. This study focuses on ants’ attraction to coffee smells: “Olfactory behavior and response of household ants (Hymenoptera) to different types of coffee odor: A coffee-based bait development prospect,” Abdul Hafiz Ab Majid, Hamady Dieng, Siti Salbiah Ellias, Faezah […]
He smells
One of NASA’s best noses got a good writeup in 2003, in an official bulletin called “NASA’s Nose: Avoiding smelly situations in space“: Thanks to George Aldrich and his team of NASA sniffers, astronauts can breathe a little bit easier. Aldrich is a chemical specialist or “chief sniffer” at the White Sands Test Facility’s Molecular Desorption […]
The dismaying danger of buying perfume as a gift
Craig Roberts, at the University of Stirling, warns you, based on his research, that there are “more reason to choose fragrances carefully“: there is no one-scent-fits-all effect here. Different fragrances suit different people. In a study with my Czech colleague [Ig Nobel Prize winner] Jan Havlíček, we found that some people get this spectacularly wrong. While […]
Identifying one’s pet(s) by how they smell
It’s (more or less) a given that dogs can reliably identify individual humans by their smell. But what about the other way around? To find out, Dr Deborah Wells and Professor Peter Hepper of the Canine Behaviour Centre, School of Psychology, at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, conducted a set of experiments. A 1m square blue […]
Smelly people in the office [podcast #78]
Smelly people in the smelly workplace — that’s the dilemma and joy of this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams — with dramatic readings by FYFD fluid dynamicist Nicole Sharp — tells about: Hugging and what it means, maybe — “Smell Organization: Bodies and Corporeal Porosity in Office Work,” Kathleen Riach […]
Garlic — A Sensory Pleasure or a Social Nuisance? [podcast 75]
Whether garlic is a sensory delight or a social horror is the big question in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams — with dramatic readings by Yale/MIT/Harvard biomedical researcher Chris Cotsapas — tells about: Garlic —A Sensory Pleasure or a Social Nuisance?— “Garlic: A Sensory Pleasure or a […]
Leveraging City Smells (for marketing purposes)
Do you associate the city of Parma (Italy) with scent of violets, or Bufallo (US) with the aroma of Cheerios™, or the city of York (UK) with the smell of horse hair & hoof oil? According to a new paper in the journal marketing theory some people do, and this has helped to inspire marketing […]