美国科学60秒 SSS 2012-11-26

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Your morning coffee. A baking pie. That turkey in the oven. There are some smells you just can’t get enough of. But mix them and other scents² all together and you get, well, nothing much.

 

According to a new study, a mash-up of 20 or 30 different odors gives you something entirely³ nondescript: almost a non-smell, if you will. The finding appears in the Proceedings⁴ of the National Academy of Sciences. 

 

If you’ve ever taken physics, you might remember that combining colors of many different wavelengths⁵ generates light that’s white. And blending sounds of many different frequencies produces white noise.

 

Well, researchers got to wondering whether there’s an equivalent phenomenon for olfaction: call it ‘white smell.’ So they whipped up various combinations of 80 distinct chemicals and had volunteers take a whiff. When the olfactory⁶ ingredient list topped 30, one cocktail⁷ smelled pretty much the same as any other, even when the mixtures didn’t have a single ingredient in common.

 

The scent¹ was not unpleasant. A professional perfumer called it “aromatic,” which is like saying that the light was, well, light. So enjoy the smells of the holiday season. But try not to sniff⁸ too many at once.

 

Thanks for the minute for scientific American sixty seconds science. I am Karen Hopkin.

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