Noam Sobel
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Huberman Lab · Essentials: How Smells Influence Our Hormones, Health & Behavior |…
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Do People Who Smell Alike Become Friends?
Noam Sobel says people who smell more alike are more likely to become friends, and the similarity is there before the friendship is.
A study in his lab looked at click friendships, pairs who feel close as soon as they meet. The question was whether that click is only shared looks or a shared sports team, or whether body odor is part of it. The lab recruited same-sex, non-romantic friend pairs across Israel whose friendship had started as a click, then sampled body odor after they used odorless soap and slept alone in a t-shirt for two nights. An electronic nose, a set of sensors for airborne molecules, found those friends more similar than chance pairings. People who smelled the samples jud
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Will Every Disease Have a Smell?
Noam Sobel says it is an overextension, but you can almost say that every disease will have an odor, and high-resolution digitized smell will be used in medical diagnosis. The technology is not close.
Every disease is a specific metabolic process. A metabolic process produces metabolites, and metabolites have a smell. Jump ahead to 4K odor transmission. When digitized smell reaches the equivalent of 4K vision and hearing available now, each person will have an electronic nose in the bathroom, in the toilet, running diagnostics all the time. In current hands, that resolution is not coming soon. A report on it might wait until retirement, and only if vision remains, and it is not anywhere in
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How Can Chanel No. 5 Be Matched With Different Ingredients?
Noam Sobel’s lab generated a metamer for Chanel No. 5 with no component from Chanel No. 5 in it. Two mixtures can smell exactly the same even when they have zero molecules in common.
A paper published in Nature, led by Arne Ravia, with Kobi Snits as a major contributor, sets out an algorithmic framework that predicts the perceptual similarity of any two molecular mixtures with very high accuracy. When two molecular mixtures are provided, the framework predicts how similar a person will smell them to be. The lab can also design mixtures with known similarities. The highlighted result is olfactory metamers: mixtures completely non-overlapping in molecular structure that smell exactly the same
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Do Women's Tears Lower Testosterone?
Noam Sobel found that sniffing women's emotional tears lowers free testosterone by about 14 percent within about 20 minutes to half an hour, even though the tears are completely odorless.
His lab harvested emotional tears and had participants sniff them. Men and women smelling women's tears detected no odor at all, and free testosterone still fell by about 14 percent. People who study testosterone described the drop as very strong, and hard to produce that fast with a drug. Andrew Huberman, drawing on years spent studying endocrine effects, called the size of the effect tremendous. A concern was that the effort required to run the study meant nobody would try to replicate it. About two year
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What Happens to Your Hand After a Handshake?
Noam Sobel found a remarkable increase in the hand going to the nose after a handshake, and the motion is a sniff.
A study in his lab brought participants into the experiment room and told them the experiment would start soon. They did not know they were already being videoed. They sat for three minutes while the team later counted how often a hand reached the face, the nose, the forehead, or the chin. The baseline was not low. Three minutes later a new experimenter, meeting them for the first time, walked in and read a consistent script: equipment was still being set up in the other room, so they should keep waiting. In half of the cases the meeting included a handshake, and in half it did
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How Many Smell Receptors Do Humans Have?
Noam Sobel says humans have about 7 million smell receptors lining the olfactory epithelium, and probably about six or seven million receptors, of about 350 different kinds. A meaningful percentage of the genome is devoted just to the kinds of olfactory receptor subtypes in the nose.
Primary olfaction is orthonasal olfaction, smell through the nose by sniffing. Airborne molecules travel about six or seven centimeters up the nose to a convoluted surface, not a flat sheet. Odorants dock at a receptor and turn into a neural signal made of action potentials, not gradient potentials. The signal propagates via the olfactory nerve through the thinnest part of the skull, which is perforated and has