- I'm a little bit skeptical but i dont have any objective argument or experience in the field to justify it. I didn't want to post it, but I was surprised that almost no one in the hn comments had the same feeling.
Don't get me wrong, I would love this finding to be replicable, it would be pivotal as what other nerves could we stimulate to change perception (think pain, mental health issues, loss of senses).
Also, I wonder if this could take us closer to understand a little bit more of how the brain works. Like this could be a great way for normalizing 'inputs' and see how different brains react to it.
Very very exciting news, but I will hold on my hype until someone else can replicate this result.
- This is exceptionally cool!
It looks like this post isn’t getting much love though. I’ll see if I can get this post added to the second chance pool[1] and get it added to the front page!
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
by RedAlakazam
3 subcomments
- As someone who was born without a sense of smell this is incredibly intriguing to me.
I've always wondered if there's gonna be a time in my life where I'd be able to experience *any* kind of smell through some new scientific discovery. And maybe this is it.
Could I shoot you guys a message when I make my way down to Caltech to try this out someday? :)
- Finally some progress towards smellovision.
by HeinzStuckeIt
1 subcomments
- Reminiscent of a finding reported at a neurology conference in the 1960s that served as the epigraph to J.H. Prynne’s collection of poems Wound Response:
“Of particular interest in the present context are the observations made on patients whose middle ear had been opened in such a way that a cotton electrode soaked in normal saline solution could be placed near the cochlea. A total of 20 surgically operated ears were studied. Eleven patients heard pure tones whose pitch corresponded to the frequency of the sinusoidal voltage applied to the electrode… One patient reported gustatory sensations.”
- Kickstarter incoming for a device that induces code smells in sync with review.
- I'd maybe make a hypothesis that a large portion of the space is "bad" smelling stuff: smoke or garbage. When people had covid-induced parosmia, it almost always seemed to be bad smelling stuff.
by comrade1234
7 subcomments
- I predict a future where once again porn is the cutting edge with a cutting edge technology.
porn + vr + smell
by AndriyKunitsyn
2 subcomments
- > Different focal spots corresponded to different smells, which we’ve replicated first-try on two people and validated with a blind trial.
So, N=2 and the people in question are co-authors. I'm not in this business, but isn't this too... early to publish?
- You write that "The olfactory bulb can vary in size by up to 3x, depending on "age and olfactory experience", so perhaps (we're making this up) with more usage your olfactory bulb might actually get bigger" which certainly does not seem out of the question. What we can assume with even greater likelihood is that the sense of smell works better when regularly stimulated. Even if your method did not have any commercial applications in entertainment it could likely (at least if this method scales beyond 4 distinct sensations) have therapeutic potential for people who suffer from blocked noses, chronic sinusitis, allergies or other conditions that block their sense of smell for physical reasons. It might even be used by Sommeliers to retain the capacity for their tradecraft while unable to use their actual nose while suffering from a cold. As we know that there is a strong association between smell and memory there are many other useful therapeutic and educational applications that come to mind if this technology can be made safe for broader consumer use. Right now, regardless of protocols used, you are somewhere on the spectrum between shining nascent lasers at your eyes to determine whether they work and emit light output (which doesn't scale with an increase in power) and the nobel prize worthy quadrant of Jonas Salk and Barry Marshall. While I do hope you succeed and I'd hate for you to be overly cautious I also hope your (olfactory) neurons survive!
by msuniverse2026
3 subcomments
- Reminds me of the vibration theory of olfaction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction
- The year is 2032. My smart fridge started A/B testing scents to reduce snacking. I ate a carrot and felt promoted.
by SilentM68
1 subcomments
- This seems interesting.
Me wonders if this can be applied to other parts of the brain, perhaps recalling long buried memories? In my case, "a 12‑lexeme mnemonic constellation that operates as a cognitive entropy incantation, each syllabic particle mapping onto a quantized shard of an authorization singularity’s randomness reservoir. This ordered cascade of linguistic quanta serves as a deterministic bootstrap constant, re‑materializing access to a distributed transactional continuum avatar via recursive derivation algorithms. In practice, it’s a compact neuro‑linguistic checksum spell, a bridge where human cortex patterns resonate with machine‑level information‑integrity archetypes, conjuring identity from chaos like a linguistic particle accelerator, aka ₿" ;)
by omnicognate
0 subcomment
- Interesting that burning was one of the smells. AFAIK that often comes up in neurological problems like strokes and epilepsy, so is it a particularly coarse sensation (like exciting all the different specialised neuerons at once)?. I imagine there's going to be a long challenge of targeting this to elicit more refined scents.
- I was about to buy a Steam Frame, now I have to wait for the version with the smell feature ;-)
by dempedempe
3 subcomments
- I find it incredible that the same olfactory activation patterns mapped to the the SAME smells in both subjects.
- Those few smells of extremes (garbage /clean air) make me think they are saturating the sensors.
- The angle and position of the transducer would make them leveragable by future VR headsets.
- If they achieve their goals; I don't know of any tech company I would trust with a direct write access to my brain.
by isoprophlex
1 subcomments
- I wonder if this makes you smell "laurax" or "olfactory white" if it glitches and triggers every receptor site simultaneously
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_white
- Very cool, although I found the link to LLMs toward the end to be a little odd.
- Finally a solution to long term nuclear warning messages! [1] All we have to do is merely create an ultrasound emitter that works over a distance of meters and lasts several thousand years. Then assail our post apocalyptic adventurers with a stench so vivid it elicits ancient racial memories of global thermonuclear war.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
- Given that people can remember smell for years, this might be very useful for learning aid. Hook it up to an IDE and let people literally smell bad code as garbage.
- I'm intrigued by the neuromodulation possibilities of this method, but I don't really understand how far can that ideally go. Since the authors are here, can you go a bit deeper in this? Thanks!
- Burning Smell or Trash doesn't give me a lot of confidence. Like pushing your thumbs into your eyes can make 'color' appear.
- Meditation and Pranayam practice also induce smells. I have experienced the smell of incense burning, fresh air etc
by londons_explore
1 subcomments
- How do the power levels here compare with say a baby ultrasound?
What are the chances baby ultrasounds are doing this unintentionally?
- This would be very cool within a game setting. Just imagine feeling the sensation of fresh air as you go through a door. Even if it were small effects it could add a huge leap in realism and immersion. Smell is a very powerful sense.
- Interesting that the smells they were able to trigger seem to be related to basic survival. Smoke bad. Rotting food bad. Fresh air good.
by stretchwithme
0 subcomment
- That doesn't surprise me.
Our fingertips feel using low frequency sound generated by our fingerprints passing over things.
- I cant wait for the day when the perfume and food shops in the mall use this for truly targeted advertisement. Cue rise of ultrasound-proof hats and lawsuits by people who report feeling sick due to such ads.
by NooneAtAll3
2 subcomments
- > At the time, all of our headsets had a knife taped to the probe
is this like some second meaning or smth?
why is there a knife on the headset?
- So they can already implement the smell of files restored from the Recycle Bin
- The natural progression of this technology is probably miniaturized transducer arrays on a chip, which would enable non-invasive write access to the entire brain.
This kind of tech should be developed as open-source projects, even for the firmware and hardware. A sufficiently advanced version of this, if widely deployed as proprietary blackboxes like smartphones are, would allow one consciousness to take over multiple bodies without their original owners knowing.
by AmbroseBierce
1 subcomments
- The adult videos industry must be already closely looking at this, and I wouldn't be surprised if they don't finance related research soon in the future, it will be VHS vs betamax all over again.
- Can a machine detect smell? That bit is left unattainable.
- that's an interesting mix of smells. i can't help but wonder if it's resulting from stimulation or the sensing of byproducts of the process itself.
- And this is why high-powered prenatal ultrasound has always concerned me (in fact the NHS advises against the commercial scans for this reason).
by llIIllIIllIIl
0 subcomment
- This experiment smells like weed
- My prediction is that in the not-to-distant future, we’re all going to live indefinitely in simulations that optimized for human experience. To do this, AIs will “highjack” our nervous systems and feed generated worlds to use to experience. This kind of thing makes it seem like it’s pretty realistic.
- This is so incredibly cool. Will a non-contact version be possible?
- A properly bizarre and interesting blogpost. Wow.
- Listen up VR companies. We DO NOT WANT SMELL-O-VISION!
by buildsjets
0 subcomment
- Whomever smelt it dealt it.
by polishdude20
0 subcomment
- What kind of probe are they using?
- From headline only, I see potential in crowd/riot control.
- ...is this safe?
- That anyone would direct a device towards their brain, intending the device to cause a physical impact on it, is amazing to me.
by petesergeant
0 subcomment
- I wonder if — within the decade — “cheap porn smell” will be a recognisable thing
by virgil_disgr4ce
3 subcomments
- OK, I want to meet these guys. This writeup has several breathtaking (if you will) passages. Like:
> "We found different scents by steering the beam over ~14 mm (20 degrees at 4 cm radius). The distance between freshness and burning was ~3.5 mm."
> "The olfactory system potentially allows writing up to 400, if not 800 due to two nostrils, dimensions into the brain. That is comparable to the dimensionality of latent spaces of LLMs, which implies you could reasonably encode the meaning of a paragraph into a 400-dimensional vector. If you had a device which allows for this kind of writing, you could learn to associate the input patterns with their corresponding meanings. After that, you could directly smell the latent space."
This just makes me grin with total delight. Completely freaking fascinating.
by Traubenfuchs
1 subcomments
- What about all the other senses?
by SV_BubbleTime
0 subcomment
- > The olfactory system potentially allows writing up to 400, if not 800 due to two nostrils, dimensions into the brain. That is comparable to the dimensionality of latent spaces of LLMs, which implies you could reasonably encode the meaning of a paragraph into a 400-dimensional vector. If you had a device which allows for this kind of writing, you could learn to associate the input patterns with their corresponding meanings. After that, you could directly smell the latent space. A bit of ultrasound, a breath in - and you understood a paragraph.
Translation: We’re very concerned that the only projects getting funding right now have to use AI.
- I want it the other way - I want google "search this smell" feature..
by zoklet-enjoyer
1 subcomments
- We are witnessing the dawn of smell-o-vision teledildonic VR tentacle porn
- [dead]
Hacker News