Deep Dive
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From KQED.
From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on Forum, we talk about the uniquely California smells that surround us. Redwood trees, Ojai tangerines, ocean spray. And we take a closer look at their power to unlock memories, as well as some of the latest findings on the science of smell.
So whether it's jasmine or jet fuel, street meat or sequoias, tell us what one scent always says California to you. Forum is next after this news.
Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. What smells as California to you? LA Times readers shared with assistant editor Maxwell Williams the smells that say Los Angeles to them. In-N-Out fries, the La Brea Tar Pits, the beach. Our sense of smell is often overlooked, says Williams, but it's the one thing that can bring back memories of a place faster than anything else.
This hour, we look at why smells are so good at unlocking memories and find out what one scent always reminds you of California. You can tell us by calling 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786, by posting on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads at CakeUBD Forum, or by emailing forum at cakeubd.org.
Joining me now is Maxwell Williams, assistant editor of West Coast Experiences at the Los Angeles Times. They're also a perfumer and make olfactory art as UFO Parfum. Maxwell, welcome to Forum. Hi, Mina. It's an honor to be on here with you, and happy National Fragrance Day. Oh, I did not know today was National Fragrance Day. That's right. It is. Well, how perfect. We didn't even try to time it like that.
Well, it's an honor to have you on and also to have Ashish Manglik on with us to associate professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF. Hi, Ashish. Thanks so much for being with us, too. Thanks for having me on. So Maxwell, I'll start with you. So a few months ago, you asked LA Times readers to share what smells remind them of LA. So did a lot of people respond?
a lot of people responded. And I found that it was, you know, it was one of those prompts that people really, really wanted to share what Southern California smelled like. And there was one that you got a lot of that you didn't expect, right? That was See's Candy?
Yeah, so See's Candy obviously is a Bay Area, but we have a factory down here in L.A., and it's right off of one of our freeways, the 405. And I guess so many people travel on that freeway as they're driving by, they smell it and they're like, OK, a little respite from the traffic. And so I'm thinking that if that was a surprise to you, See's did not come to mind for you personally. What's your L.A. scent, Maxwell? Yeah.
So I really love the smell of jasmine. And I live pretty close to the L.A. River. And so I go for a lot of walks on the L.A. River. And every spring, jasmine blooms by the river on the fences in these sort of big walls of jasmine.
And as I'm walking by, I smell kind of this like candy, smarty smell. And before I even see the jasmine, I can smell it. And I'll be with my partner and I'll look around immediately and try to find it. Yeah, jasmine definitely has a really potent scent. And Ashish, what about yours? What's a scent that reminds you, well, first of California? Yeah, for me, it's...
That smell of redwood trees, the days you go camping in the summer, and we go to Samuel P. Taylor up a little bit north of San Francisco, and it's that little spicy kind of cinnamony smell. That just reminds me of California every time, and I just crave that. It's just like a great, great smell.
Yeah, that is a beautiful smell. You are in good company. There are so many people who've written Redwoods. David writes, the best smell of California are a coastal Redwood Grove and the dense California coastal chaparral on a moist, foggy morning. Another listener on Blue Sky writes, Redwood Groves, the fall tomato harvest and October ag burns. Do you have a, do you live in San Francisco, Ashish, and do you have a San Francisco scent?
I do live in San Francisco. I think my favorite San Francisco—so I live in Potrero Hill. And, you know, right in Potrero Hill for a long time we had the Anchor Steam Brewery. So it's just right down the house, right down the street from where I live.
And on mornings where they would brew, there would be this beautiful smell of freshly brewed beer. And I would bike by that, you know, that's just a phenomenal San Francisco smell for me. Unfortunately, you know, Anchor Steam closed down just a year or two ago. And I really miss that smell.
Yeah. We've got a couple of producers who are telling me that they do too. Maxwell, so do you have a scent that reminds you of California that's different from your L.A. jasmine smell? Yeah, I do. So I grew up in Vermont, and I
I moved to LA about 16 years ago, or I moved to California. And so I have a lot of smells associated with Vermont. If you ever get a chance to enter a maple sugar house, do it. But a smell that I associate with Vermont is also like cow manure. So when I'm driving up the grapevine and I smell the manure, I definitely get kind of transported back to home, which is comforting for me. So I do...
genuinely like it. I'm glad to know that's comforting for you. Let me go to caller Mary in Oakland. Hi, Mary, you're on. Hi, good morning. Well, I'm also from the East Coast, and I would say that my favorite smell on the East Coast is that of lilacs that come out around Mother's Day. But here on the West Coast, I love the oyster smell that you find at Tomales Bay. Wow.
However, my favorite flower in California is calla lilies. They grow wild everywhere that there's a little bit of wet soil. And although I'm not religious at all, I'm a total atheist, there's a beautiful quote from the Bible, which is, consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin. Yet Solomon...
was not in all his glory was not arrayed as one of them. Well, thanks, Mary, for sharing what that said unlocks for you. And yeah, calla lilies, they are hardy plants, that's for sure. But Maxwell flowers, so many of the responses you got talked about the scent of the rose parade, right? Why do you think that is? Is it just that it's flowers? Or do you think there's something else?
Yeah, I do think that there's something else. I mean, I think that, you know, we'll probably talk a little bit more about this, but, you know, as one of the things that people bring up a lot when I'm talking to them about scent is this, you know, association with memory, obviously.
And I think that part of it, a lot of the people that mention the Rose Parade, I think that part of it is that they went when they were a kid. And I think that when they smell a rose, maybe it brings them back to the Rose Parade. And so I think that they just really carry that with them their whole lives. And that's a big part of it, I think, for people. Yeah. Actually, Ashish, I want to ask you more about that. What do we know about the connection between scent and memory? Yeah.
Yeah, this is a really fascinating area of neuroscience. And this is something that's been known for some time, this notion of involuntary memory, this idea that, again, things like scent can bring forth these memories very rapidly.
What we know that's unique about scent and how it enters our brain is that most of our other senses, like how we see, how we feel the world around us when we touch things, all of those senses kind of have a relay station in the brain. The information comes from the outside. There's a little relay station in the brain called the thalamus. And then that information is allowed to enter the rest of our brain for it to be perceived.
What's unique about scent is that it bypasses that relay station. There's no thalamic control of that information coming into our brain. And it's thought that this direct connection is probably quite important for why scent is so deeply associated and so easily associated with memories. Wow, that's really interesting. And there's probably an evolutionary reason for it too, just so that we remember what smells to stay away from in case they're harmful to us.
Yeah, there's an evolutionary rationale to this in that sensing molecules that are scent-like molecules probably arose in evolution much earlier than, for example, the ability to visualize light or to perceive things by touch. And so the idea that many people have in the scientific field is that because it's such a primordial sense—
scent itself bypasses this kind of gating of information. So I read about a study at UC Irvine that found that people who rotated daily, like pleasant smells in their home for six months, could retain a word list on a memory test far better than those who didn't in their experiment. Does that sound plausible to you?
Yeah, I'd have to look at the study, obviously, very carefully to evaluate it. But it doesn't sound implausible to me. I think there's a lot of associations of our sense of smell with a whole host of things, not only better cognitive performance, but certainly on the other side, folks that lose their sense of smell, many have depressed mood and a lot of other associations like that. So
I think at one level, all of us take our sense of smell for granted. But at a deeper level, we know that these associations tell us that our sense of smell is really quite important for us as humans. Yeah. So could it even reverse memory loss?
Now you're getting a little bit too far. I'm really asking the associate professor of pharmaceutical chemistry to really comment on these. You know, certainly for folks that, you know, have had, you know, obviously the past couple of years have had a loss of sense of smell from from COVID-19 or, you know, from infection doing scent training. So, you know, basically smelling and trying to remember deeply what that smell what that smell might be.
And there's pretty good studies showing that that enables your sense of smell to return more rapidly and more fully. And so certainly there is an aspect of scent training that could be quite important. Now, whether that associates with broader learning or memory deficits remains, I think, to be fully fleshed out. I think also to cut in, I believe that when your memory starts to go, one of the first things that also starts to go is your sense of smell.
That's certainly the case. In certain types of neurodegenerative diseases, you know, kind of a hallmark or kind of the canary in the coal mine there is the loss of the sense of smell. And that's thought to be that maybe the neurons that enable you to smell are perhaps more vulnerable to some of those same deficits. Right.
Well, we're talking with Ashish Minglik, associate professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UC San Francisco and Maxwell Williams, assistant editor of West Coast Experience for the Los Angeles Times, all about scent and particularly the smells of California and the memories that they unlock for you. Renee writes, growing up in Sacramento in the 50s and 60s, the smell of freshly mown grass evokes hot summer nights, eating never refrigerated tomatoes and drinking root beer floats.
Deanne writes,
And I am honored. Listeners, what smell always reminds you of California? Can you describe the smell? Is there a part of California that smells best to you? What memories do these scents unlock? 866-733-6786, the number, email address, forum at kqed.org. We're at KQED Forum on our social channels. Stay with us. I'm Mina Kim.
Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about the smells of California. In and out, sea's candy have been mentioned, roses and redwood trees, and also the memories that they unlock. We're talking about it with Maxwell Williams of the LA Times, assistant editor of West Coast Experiences, and Ashish Mainlik of UC San Francisco, associate professor of pharmaceutical chemistry there. And of course, with you, our listeners, let me go to Biana in Humboldt County. Hi, Biana. You're on.
Hi. Hi. Thanks for taking my call. Yeah, I'd like to just mention that I've lived all over California, from Southern California, and now I'm up in Humboldt County. So I've had a lot of different smells in California. But in 2015, I lost my sense of smell, and it really didn't come back until it was gone for seven years. And
And it was a very disorientating experience to just lose my sense of smell. It almost made me lose my sense of place. When I grew up, when I was a kid, I was in the San Bernardino Mountains and the smell of pine was just beautiful and wonderful and smelled like home. And then when I went to visit down there, once I lost my sense of smell, it really had lost this place.
whole element to what it was, you know, what my experience was to be in a place and it
It was really weird not being able to smell. It was like missing, it was like having a disability that nobody recognizes or realizes how important that is. It's like the invisible disability. But now I'm so happy to be back in the smelling world. My smell isn't as strong as it used to be, but I'm so appreciative of every little scent I get these days. Yeah. Bianna, thanks so much for sharing your experience and experience.
Ashish, it really does underscore some of the things you were saying about the response that people have and the kind of effect that it can have on them. Do you think people downplay the importance of smell as one of our five senses compared to the others?
I mean, my experience was that people didn't really understand what I was talking about unless I got down and specifically described that I'm tasting this basil leaf and I used to love basil. You know, it had such an amazing smell and now it just tastes like a bitter leaf.
Yeah. There's a whole experience that you're missing when you don't have the smell. Yeah. Bina, thanks. I think, Ashish, that this was something that you also felt like, that there are myths around smells that sort of treat them as if, you know, they are not as significant to some of the others of our five senses. Yeah.
Yeah, indeed. I think there's been this perception that humans and other humans certainly have like a diminished sense of smell compared to other species. You know, for example, like mice or rodents or, you know, other other species that really rely on their sense of scent. You know, obviously the common one is, you know, dogs have this amazing ability to detect scents at very, very, very low levels.
But, you know, the folks that have really looked at this very carefully have shown that humans actually have a really remarkable sense of smell. Our sense of smell is really quite powerful as well. So it's not really a second sense, you know, to our sense of vision, for example, or sense of sight. We really are really quite good at it. So what are some examples of sort of our remarkable ability in your view?
One kind of example is our ability to detect and discriminate odors is really quite good. And obviously there are other species like dogs that are slightly better. But just in a comparative sense, humans can actually sense these things down to very, very dilute levels and discriminate odors really quite precisely as well. Like they can tell even sometimes if someone's sick or healthy? Yeah.
Yeah, this is a great example. So, you know, there are examples where people can, you know, for example, a spouse of someone who has new onset of some sort of disease can sense just by their sense of smell that something's wrong with their partner. And that just gives, you know, I think a good clue that our ability to see something that's a little bit or smell something that's a little bit off is really quite powerful.
Ooh, this person brings up a lot of things. First of all, Maxwell...
I bet you got the beach frequently as a response or the ocean spray or the salty air for California as well. Did you also hear that our ocean or that sort of scent surrounding the ocean is different here than in other geographic places? Yeah, I definitely think that the Pacific Coast has a different smell than the Atlantic Coast, I would say. Yeah.
I did hear from a lot of people that were talking that when they went to the beach, one of the main smells that they would smell is...
And I don't think you get that as much on the East Coast where, you know, I grew up on the East Coast. I would go to the beach and a lot of times it would be overcast and you might not need as much sunscreen. And you might not, you know, be as surrounded by people, right? There's so many more people on the beaches in California. So I think that that was definitely a big difference between the two places. Yeah, that's such a good point.
actually, because I also grew up in a cold place and an island on the Atlantic. And I don't think sunscreen really stood out to me the way it stands out here in California. Um, the other thing that was so interesting was, uh, this listener saying, I can't describe odors in words. And I find that to be true, like that it's hard to have a smell vocabulary, um,
Have you noticed that, Maxwell? Or as somebody who is a perfumer and does olfactory art, have you honed an ability to do this as a result? Yeah. The language of smell is very funny in that there aren't a ton of smell-only words. A lot of it is borrowed and metaphorical. So like, for instance, when somebody says something smells green, right, that's a term cribbed from our ocular terminology. Or when something smells soft, right, that's from touch.
So I think, yeah, I think it's quite a difficult thing for people to be able to describe certain smells. Yeah. And I think as a perfumer, you do a little bit of study, you know,
One of the things that you get when you're learning perfume is a perfume wheel. And oftentimes it'll have all these different words on it so that you can associate some of the materials with the way certain things smell. Like the word agrestic really just means kind of French flowers. And so you get that word and that's kind of a smell only word in a way. Yeah, people lean a lot on agrestics.
metaphor. I think you said they also can turn to music as a helpful way to describe scents. Why? Yeah, so music and perfume have been associated for a very long time. I actually teach a class about this. So
I think that there are a couple of reasons for this. Our auditory system and our olfactory system work in somewhat similar ways, although they decode very different things. They both have kind of the initial entry point is somewhat similar. It's capturing different things and things like that.
And so I think that's one of the main reasons that it was in the 19th century that it was first just started to describe that there, there was a, a,
This guy that wrote a book, his name is Septimus P.S., and he wrote a book about perfume materials. And in the first edition, he kind of made a little bit of a reference to the notes of scale. And that first edition sold out really well. And people were like, this is the most important part of the book. So in the second edition, he really expanded upon it.
And nowadays we use a lot of those same terms. Notes are still something that we describe when we talk about perfume. A perfumer sits down when they make a perfume at something called a perfume organ. And a lot of these terms are still used today. Yeah. Ashish, do you have any sense of why our smell vocabulary can be hard to access? Yeah, this is, it's a challenge because I think
On the one hand, if you do a task like ask a person to discriminate two different odors, we're very good at that. And that's, again, what I was referring to earlier, that our ability to detect and discriminate odors is really quite good. But I think this notion of, you know, that we have a smaller repertoire of olfactory sense is because we can't quite put it in words what we're truly discriminating or what we can truly tell that's different, you know, between one...
odor in the other. And, you know, it's really fun hearing Maxwell's perspective as a perfumer, you know, how to think about distinguishing things that are otherwise maybe somewhat similar, but, you know, being able to split that and come up with words or descriptions that maybe multiple people can share and say, yeah, that kind of makes sense to me. That does kind of, you know, smell like something else that I can associate with.
So, Ashish, why do things smell different to different people? Like the same thing. Yeah, this is a great question. So, you know, this has to do a little bit with the chemistry of smell. And that's really what my own research, you know, has focused on quite a bit. So if you want to understand this, we have to get a little bit into the biology of how all this happens. And smell molecules, you know, there's probably...
hundreds of thousands of different molecules that we can sense as smells. And the way that biology solves this problem is that there's hundreds of receptors, you know, proteins that these smell molecules bind to that are expressed or made in our nose that allow us to sense these smell molecules.
So part of the reason why there's a difference in how I perceive a smell or you perceive a smell is because some of those receptors are different. There is a genetic difference between one of those receptors between you and me, and that's what gives rise to a difference in how we perceive smells. That's one reason.
Another reason is that our sense of smell is deeply influenced by our prior experience. And unlike some of our other senses, you know, we can basically, the brain somewhat controls what is important to us at any given time in the sense of smell. So the brain can kind of retune which receptors are made, and that will influence, you know, what even our perception is.
Fascinating. We're talking with Dr. Ashish Minglik, Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF, Maxwell Williams, Assistant Editor of West Coast Experiences at the LA Times, also a perfumer and makes olfactory art as UFO Parfum. And you, our listeners, are joining as well at the email address forum at kqed.org.
the phone number 866-733-6786 and also on blue sky, Facebook, Instagram, and threads at cake, QED forum, telling us what smell always reminds you of California or a city or a place here, what memories they unlock or, uh, uh,
If there's a favorite part of the state that you love to smell, Bruce writes that chocolate smell in Burlingame is from the Guitard Chocolate Company roasting cocoa beans. I believe See's now uses Guitard Chocolate in their candies as well. So they also connect us to different places. Stephen writes, one of my favorite olfactory experiences ever was in the 1980s, driving through Orange County on a warm spring night past blooming orange groves.
The scent wafting in the air was heavenly. The other classic is the Sierra Nevada conifer forest. Let me go to Barbara in San Francisco. Hi, Barbara, you're on.
Well, thank you. I have a vivid visual and olfactory memory of the Folgers Coffee Building on the Embarcadero, returning here on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. It had a man in a caftan standing in profile and drinking a cup of coffee and welcoming me back home. It's
It sounds like you can smell it now just thinking about it. Over my cup of coffee. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that as well. Bastion writes, my California smell story is connected to sailing on San Francisco Bay and extended sail in the fresh breeze, which has its own clean ocean smell, is the perfect way to turn the nose into a sort of canvas for the various smells that waft into the bay from the land carried by the wind.
Near Sausalito, there's a wonderful smell of dust, sage, and anise brush from the Marin Headlands. And when sailing cityside near the ferry building, one will smell an amazing mix of urban smells, Chinatown's five spice and fried food, sometimes garlic and coffee. Both of these smells instantly take me back to many great sailing trips there, indelibly connected with San Francisco in my mind.
Maxwell, you were sure to ask about foul, nasty or repellent smells among your readers. Why? And what did you hear?
I would love to go back to really quickly something that Dr. Menglich was talking about. Yeah, so as we were talking about, I work in olfactory art, which is art that works with scent. And one of the projects that I did is I worked with an artist named Sean Raspit, who works with science and art as well. And we identified a bunch of
these olfactory receptors that, as Dr. Mengel said, have kind of variation or mutations. And what we did was we found the molecules that were associated with these olfactory receptors
And, you know, so for an instance, some musks, right? When a perfume has musk in it, often a little trick as a perfumer, we'll put a bunch of different musk molecules because the variation is so common amongst these olfactory receptors that you want to make sure that a lot of people smell musk, right? So anyway, we used...
only materials associated with the olfactory receptors that have a genetic variation or mutation and we made a perfume out of those materials and it was very interesting we presented it at this um this summit called the experimental scent summit which is put on by the institute for our an olfaction and we handed out pieces of paper and it had all the words that we associated with all of these smells and we had people circle the words and
And pretty much every response was different. So I just wanted to put that out there. That is so cool. It's an art project, but it had a little bit of science to it.
And then, you know, when we had that listener say, I dislike the skunky smell of marijuana and I think rotting citrus or what they were saying. I thought it was interesting that they brought that up too. It brings a lot of things together. It makes me think of what Ashish was saying too about how powerful our sense of smell is. And so as a result, right, we must have some pretty strong reactions to nasty smells. Yeah.
Yeah. And to get back to your question. Yeah. I thought it was really important that we, you know, don't kind of ignore the bad smells. I think bad smells are sort of a very important part of our lives. And as Dr. Menglik was saying, you know, it's it's
one of the reasons that we developed, right, this part of our brain was to identify these bad smells. If it was the smell of, you know, rotting flesh, then we avoided that, right? If it was the smell of another animal's, you know, urine, then we avoided that. So, you know, I think that was like a big part of human development. And, you know, those are bad smells, but they're also really important. And also, you know,
Bad smells are not bad to everyone. Like I said, you know, I really like the smell of cow manure and it brings me a bit of comfort. And a lot of people like a lot of different smells. Some people love the smell of sort of the mystery meats grilling outside of, you know, a concert as you walk out of the concert in L.A. You know, that was a big one that people brought up.
And some people hate it. And some people love the smell of marijuana. And some people don't love it. And I think that there's something important that people understand is that
like with a lot of these receptors, some people smell them a little bit differently and they might like it for some reason or another. And, you know, as Dr. Mengel was also saying, you know, you might, you might like it because you have associations with it that are more social and, and you might, you know, love the smell of marijuana because, you know, you might partake in it. Yeah. There was one that I was surprised by in reading your,
and that was the person who said they love jet fuel, right? Which is not something that I would think about as a smell that would bring back kind of loving memories, but it did for them. Just, you know, living by LAX and the...
and everything that it meant, you know, and how it reminded them of hot summer days, which was maybe when they smelled it the most. Those kinds of things, really, really lovely reflections to hear about. And we are getting a lot of them from you, our listeners, as we talk about the smells that say California to you with Maxwell Williams and Dr. Ashish Manglek. We'll have more after the break. I'm Mina Kim. ♪
You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about why smells are so good at unlocking memories and learning what scent always makes you think of California. We're with Dr. Ashish Manglik, Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF and Maxwell Williams, Assistant Editor of West Coast Experiences at the LA Times, a perfumer and olfactory artist as UFO Parfum.
And you, our listeners, are writing, thinking about today's show, I immediately smelled the eucalyptus grove before entering Monterey Bay. On drives to the aquarium, I would time it just right and exclaim to my young son, open your window, we're here. Thanks for the precious memory. And of course, I love passing in and out fries, a blazing. Another listener, Lubov, writes,
I know I'm getting close to my home in Albany when I can pick up the scent of iodine from the sea. It used to be ketchup from the Heinz Cannery or roasting coffee crossing the Bay Bridge, but iodine will always be there. Deborah writes,
And the smell of the garlic fields told me I was almost home. Now when I smell garlic, I remember those happy days and youthful adventures that melts away the stresses I encountered in my business days. This listener writes, COVID took roughly 50% of my sense of smell. I've seen many articles about retraining your senses. Do you have any recommendations or advice about this? Oh, probably either of you, but actually let me go to you first on that.
Yeah, I don't have any particular advice outside of I actually did this myself, you know, having lost my entire sense of smell post COVID. And I thought it actually helped. But maybe Max, you might have you might have a deeper insight into what actually helps here.
Yeah, I mean, this is a tough one. You know, I've done a little bit of work in this, you know, as we talked about before. So my mother is experiencing a little bit of memory loss right now. And so I've been thinking a lot about like how I can
Send her some perfume materials and maybe she'll be able to smell them. And I think it's really a good thing to just sort of exercise the nose by smelling everything that you can and seeing what olfactory receptors are still working, seeing what things are still triggering that part of your brain and just smelling everything you can. I mean, I think that that's probably...
it's like, you know, PT a little bit, right? It's like you're going into your physical therapist and you're just working out that muscle all the time. And for me, I've talked to a lot of people that have also lost their sense of smell post-COVID and it's a tough one because I've heard some people that this works and from some people that it's just a long slog and that it'll eventually come back. But yeah, I'm not sure. Yeah.
Ashish, can you tell me a little bit more about some of your lab's recent achievements? One of which, as I understand it, is 3D mapping when a scent molecule hits the smell receptors in our body and what that looks like. Yeah. So one of the central challenges in understanding our sense of smell is
And I think really put pretty nicely by Maxwell is that for a long time, the way that we've tried to understand the sense of smell is, you know, folks will have some sort of smell molecule, smell it, and then describe what it smells like.
that's very different to other senses, right? For example, for our sense of sight, we know that proteins in our body will basically sense a wavelength of light. We understand how that happens. We understand then how the brain reads that out to give us color perception. So the dream, maybe the long-term dream from the chemistry of how we smell is that if I gave you the shape of an odorous molecule that you could—
with pretty good confidence say, you know, this is what it smells like or this is what we predict that it might smell like. That is basically unachievable today. And so one of the key bottlenecks is that we don't understand at a deep level how the three-dimensional shape of an odorous molecule actually interacts with the receptor's
Inside our body, you know, what's specific about this odor molecule that allows it to interact with this receptor that then gives rise to the smell of, you know, a green smell or a flowery smell or whatever. And so a fundamental advance that my lab made over the past couple of years is we've
captured the three-dimensional shape. Like, what does this receptor actually look like in three dimensions? And then how does a smell molecule actually fit inside one of these receptors? And so what does a deeper understanding of that pave the way for, potentially? So the long-term dream is that, you know, if we could understand what these receptors look like, you know, how are these hundreds of receptors slightly different from each other? What are the shapes of these receptors that are slightly different from each other?
And how does that then allow each receptor to recognize, for example, this kind of smell molecule versus that kind of smell molecule? If we had a deep understanding of the chemistry that drives this kind of coding, then we could really decode, you know, why is it that one scent is perceived this way in the brain and another scent is perceived as a different scent? And what would that potentially do or lead you to that understanding? Yeah.
Yeah, one could imagine, you know, the kinds of stuff that Maxwell talked about that perfumers do right now, you know, basically having a series of molecules that they're trying to mix and put together in a way that evokes a certain kind of smell perception. That is very dependent right now, obviously, on experts like Maxwell and other perfumers that are just really good at this. We want to basically bring a quantitative approach.
view into that world? Like, how do we quantify this at a very molecular level? And maybe the long-term dream is that that allows us to either create new perfumes, create new smell entities, things that we haven't perceived before. You could imagine, for example, very specific things that you could do. One example would be molecules that can
prevent you from smelling certain bad smells. And there are folks, for example, in the Gates Foundation that are quite interested in finding ways of not having the negative smell of human feces in parts of the world that prevent, for example, use of certain sanitation facilities. So there's a lot of different things that one could do, but we need a deep understanding of how the molecules that enable our sense of smell interact with the proteins in our body that allow us to smell. Yeah.
That's fascinating. Well, let me go to caller Lindy in Berkeley. Hi, Lindy, you're on.
Yes, I'm 80 years old, so my memories that I was thinking about of smells in my life in Berkeley go way back to the era when the streets were being paved. They would lay a layer of tar over them first, and that tar was made liquid and heated up in these little boilers that were pulled by a truck onto the street.
And when me and my friends would be running around playing, and we would smell that smell of the tar boiler, we would run over, and the tar was all over the surface of the boiler, but also in globby drips that would drip down underneath it. And we would run over to it and crack the little globs off, which were semi-soft, pop them in our mouths,
And two on them. It was delicious. Really? You know?
We didn't have candy in those days and candy stores. And licorice was one of our favorites, but we couldn't get it. So we would chew on tar, which now looking back was obviously not a very healthy thing. But luckily the streets weren't paved that often either. Lindy, I love that. Tar has a bad smell to me still smells bad.
Sounds good.
on a clear slope, stand at the top, hop on the cardboard, and it was like a super fast sled, and we would sled down on the dry golden grass down to the bottom. Lindy, you know what I'm noticing is that you are a storyteller. Like, I could so picture the boy
a boiler and you cracking up a piece of tar and popping it in your mouth and just really wonderful imagery. Thank you so much. Sorry, Maxwell. No, I was just saying I love those. Those are that is beautiful.
Those are beautiful memories. Yeah, really, really wonderful. Another listener on Discord actually writes, I love the smell of jasmine at this time of year. So you're jasmine there, Max. I associate with my commute from the west side of LA to USC's campus in springtime with showing my parents around the city with my aspiration to own and then eventually actually owning a home with a hearty pink background.
jasmine plant. Another listener, Maria writes, I love the smell of low tide at Bolinas Lagoon. How can one recreate a scent? I would love to recreate it. So Maxwell, I want to, well, there are people who have created scents, right, that are inspired by California smells so that you can have them with you all the time.
Yeah, you were. There are. There are a bunch, right? And it's pretty funny because a lot of those, you know, I'm not...
skeptical of, but they get the gist of L.A. There's one Louis Vuitton one that was made by a French perfumer named Jacques Cavalier, who's very famous in the industry. He also made very popular perfumes, L'eau d'Essay and Fenty, which is Rihanna's perfume, and about 30 other perfumes for Vuitton.
One of the issues I kind of have with these perfumes is that this one, the one there's one from Byredo called Mojave Ghost. These perfumers aren't from California. And I don't mind that so much, but they often end up feeling a little bit like a pastiche of a smell of California through the eyes of a French or Swedish person.
So when I make perfume, I generally stay away from place as an influence for this reason. I would say that there are a lot of pitfalls and no one will ever be happy with what you are parachuting in. Yes. Well, and in terms of recreating a smell, didn't you try to recreate the jasmine smell or create the jasmine smell by pulling blooms and boiling them in Crisco or something like that? Yeah. So I...
You know, my neighborhood has a lot of jasmine blooms in it. And also, you know, just around this time of year, as the listener was saying, the blooms are just everywhere. So I had become interested in this old style of flowering.
of like oil capture. So I wanted to make sort of this very old style. It's called enfleurage, which is you take the flower and at night the flower expresses the oil from, you know, the petals and the bloom.
And so I would go out at night with my partner at the time and we would gather like garbage bags full of jasmine flowers and we would put them face down into a fat. And I was vegetarian at the time, so usually it's supposed to be an animal fat, but we were capturing it in a vegetable, you know, Crisco type thing. And so we lay it down and then we
the next, you know, take them off in the morning. And then the next night we would go out and get a garbage bag full of Jasmine blooms, put them back on in a layer over the top of the Crisco, same Crisco. And you just do that until Jasmine season ends. And, and then at the end of it, you clarify it and you pull out the oils and you can make
a little bit of your own kind of old style tincture. This is a kind of an antiquated way of working nowadays. They use all kinds of different, you know, steam distillations and all kinds of different things. But this is how they used to do it in the fields in, you know, France back in the, you know, early 20th century. So interesting. Well, let me remind listeners, you're listening to Forum.
I'm Nina Kim. Getting so many beautifully written reflections, Jennifer writes, As a little girl, I'd go to my grandparents in Woodside. There I developed memories of the smells of marigolds and also skunks. No one understands why I love the smell of skunk, but I truly do. Now that my grandparents are gone, it is so special that I have these smell memories of exploring under the thick trees, looking for ladybugs, sitting in the backyard, seeing and smelling the yellow marigolds, playing on the swing under the oak tree and the smell of skunk wafting in across the backyard.
field. Jeff writes,
Let me go to caller Steve in Las Gadas. Hi, Steve. You're on.
Yeah, hi. Okay, I've got a kind of reverse experience with smell. Driving north on I-5 a number of years ago, there was a wildfire to the west, and the smoke was really coming in, and I could smell that smoke driving along I-5 somewhere there near Williams or thereabouts. A couple of years later, I...
I drove again along I-5 northbound around Williams, and there was no fire, no wildfire, no smoke. But I...
the location seemed to trigger the smell of that previous event when there was wildfire. So I'm wondering if that kind of reverse creation makes any sense to the investigators there. What do you think? There's a term for that. It's called phantasmia.
Phantasmia. That sounds like a really fitting term. It's smelling odors that aren't actually present and it can be caused by, you know, any number of reasons, memory or, you know, anything else. So it's, yeah, it's a very interesting thing and I experience it once in a while myself.
Have you studied that at all or have some thoughts on it, Ashish? No, this is fascinating. It's among the first times. I think I've encountered this maybe once before, but not in this very explicit way. Yeah. Well, Denise writes, my favorite smell is California sagebrush. You can get a whiff of a dried specimen at the OMCA's Natural Science Gallery by pushing a button, but I just have to brush past it in my backyard. It's so wonderful that I would nominate it for the official California state smell. We don't have one, right? Yeah.
So state officials, are you listening? Carl writes, I remember the smell of the soil in West End San Rafael where my grandmother's house was. And then years later when I was in the hills above Monte Serrano in Saratoga, I smelled the same smell again. It is great. It must come from fungus or other plants mixed in with the soil smell.
Another listener, Jeremy, writes, Redwood forests. We're always returning back to where we began, Redwood forests after the rain, of course. But let's not forget the mighty bay laurel, floral, and herbicides combining in our cooking pots and steaming in the kitchen. The smell of San Francisco, bay funk, I call it, oceany, fishy, briny, mixed with fresh, foggy, and car exhaust, turned to crabs, cooking in North Beach pots, steaming in laurels.
Hey, so if Maxwell, somebody wanted to learn how to make perfumes and to capture their favorite California smell, should they take a class? Is it something they can pick up from videos on YouTube? Like, what do you recommend?
Yeah, I highly recommend taking a class. I think it's important to take a class if you do want to learn how to make perfume because there are a lot of different things that go into making perfume that you might not really think of. You might think of it as just kind of mixing some oils together and things like that.
Um, there's a lot of things like proper lab hygiene that I think are very important and that you can really only be taught. Um, and also it's good to be around people when you're making perfume and you're learning how to make it so you can get a lot of feedback. Um,
You know, feedback is sort of the most important thing. You know, you're making something that other people smell and you want them to like it. So you want to make sure other people smell it. Yeah. Well, that's what we thrive on here at Forum is hearing from our audiences and getting their feedback.
So thank you, listeners, for sharing your small stories. We so appreciate it. Thank you, Maxwell Williams and Ashish Manglik for coming in and talking about them with our listeners. And thank you, Caroline Smith, for producing today's segment. Forum's team also includes Dan Zoll, Mark Nieto, Francesca Fenzi, Jennifer Eng, Susie Britton, our engineers, Danny Bringer, Christopher Bielan,
Bielan, Brendan Willard, interns Brian Vo and Jesse Fisher, Katie Springer, our Vice President of News Ethan Tov and Lindsay, and our Chief Content Officer Holly Kernan. I'm Ina Kim. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend.