Dr. Noam Sobel: How Smells Influence Our Hormones, Health & Behavior

In this episode, my guest is Noam Sobel, PhD, professor of neurobiology in the department of brain sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Dr. Sobel explains his lab’s research on the biological mechanisms of smell (“olfaction”) and how sensing odorants and chemicals in our environment impacts human behavior, cognition, social connections, and hormones. He explains how smell is a crucial component of “social sensing” and how we use olfaction when meeting new people to determine things about their physiology and psychology, and he explains how this impacts friendships and romantic partners. He explains how smell influences emotions, hormone levels, memories and the relationship between breathing and autonomic homeostasis. He describes how smell-based screening tests can aid disease diagnosis and explains his lab’s work on digitization of smell — which may soon allow online communication to include “sending of odors” via the internet. Dr. Sobel’s work illustrates how sensitive human olfaction is and how it drives much of our biology and behavior.

Articles

• The Age of Olfactory Bulb Neurons in Humans (Neuron)
• The Privileged Brain Representation of First Olfactory Associations (Current Biology)
• Mechanisms of scent-tracking in humans (Nature Neuroscience)
• Measuring and Characterizing the Human Nasal Cycle (PLOS ONE)
• Human non-olfactory cognition phase-locked with inhalation (Nature Human Behaviour)
• A social chemosignaling function for human handshaking (eLife)
• There is chemistry in social chemistry (ScienceAdvances)
• MHC-dependent mate preferences in humans (Proceedings of the Royal Society B)
• An Exteroceptive Block to Pregnancy in the Mouse (Nature)
• Fear-Related Chemosignals Modulate Recognition of Fear in Ambiguous Facial Expressions (Psychological Science)
• Sniffing the human body volatile hexadecanal blocks aggression in men but triggers aggression in women (ScienceAdvances)
• Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression (Nature)
• Regulation of ovulation by human pheromones (Nature)
• Human Tears Contain a Chemosignal (Science)
• Why Only Humans Shed Emotional Tears (Human Nature)
• Revisiting the revisit: added evidence for a social chemosignal in human emotional tears (Cognition and Emotion)
• Increase of tear volume in dogs after reunion with owners is mediated by oxytocin (Current Biology)
• An olfactory self-test effectively screens for COVID-19 (Communications Medicine)

Other Resources

• Joachim Löw video
• Osmo
• Odor Space