Senses such as taste or sight have established a multidimensional systematic scale that helps to understand perception. But what about smell? For the first time,American scientists have specified about ten minimum categories in which odors can be describedthanks to the simplification of a statistical model, as published this week by the magazine Plos One.
The researchers argue that the world of odors is structured and organized into a few categories that they have identified using a set of statistical algorithms. The study, carried out on a database of 146 olfactory descriptors, classifies the space of olfactory perceptions in at least ten basic dimensions, differentiated intofloral, woody or resinous fragrance, non-citrus fruit, chemical odor, minty or refreshing, sweet, burnt or smoky, citrus, andtwo types of foul stench:rotten and stale.
“The categories are approximate. The important thing is the magnitude and that the qualities of each smell are independent,” says Jason Castro, a researcher at Bates University in the US and co-author of the study, in statements to the SINC agency.
“We are cautious about our research. We are not saying that we have solved the categories of smell, rather that we have established an interesting model capable of establishing olfactory qualities,” adds Castro.
To date, the sense of smell did not have such a complete statistical system that facilitated its understanding, unlike others such as taste or hearing. “We know that there are five basic qualities in taste that organize perceived sensations, but listing the types of odor was an open question,” says Castro, who together with his colleagues has developed new models of smell on thepublic database Atlas of odor character profiles, published by Andrew Dravniek in 1985. They have applied both “statistical and mathematical techniques to organize data and odors” and a model of chemical structures to “predict what kind of odor a compound will have based on its molecular structure.”
