Our Mind-Boggling Sense of Smell

> it takes only two synapses for information to travel from the air, through your nose, and to the core cortex

I was expecting it would be just a low level feature detector since smell is like like a bag-of-words format (unordered) while vision is at least 2D (space) and hearing 1D (time).

One fascinating thing about smell is that you can smell only on inhalations. On exhalations, the sensors shut down. Hard to figure out what the evolutionary benefit of that was. But so it is for humans, and I believe for most mammals.

  > And where do you put indole, an unpleasant smelling
  > crystalline organic compound found in coal tar and
  > feces?

Dilute indole actually smells quite pleasant and is widely used in perfumery.

Makes a great case that smell is very different than our “favorite” sense, vision. I heard her interview on Sean Carroll’s podcast, was super interesting.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/07/13/105-...

If the sense of smell is pattern recognition, would training it make us better at recognizing patterns?

Smell is the primary sense and the sooner that Computer Vision embraces that fact the better it will be for any system that needs any form of context sensitivity or relevance detection.

It's all well and good to have awesome algorithms for detecting X, Y, or Z in a stream of stimuli but it's smell that tells us which things to anticipate.