The nose is a protrusion that houses the nostrils, which receive and expel air for respiration alongside the mouth. The purpose of the nose is to warm, clean, and humidify the air that a person breathes. In addition, it helps a person to smell and taste. Our noses are sensitive but not as sensitive as a dog’s nose. We like smells like food and flowers. Some smells we don’t like include smelly socks, rotten eggs, and horse poop.
But can our nose help us pick our friends? Inbal Ravreby, a graduate student in the lab of Noam Sobel (an olfaction researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel) was curious whether very swift friendships had an olfactory component, like picking up similarities in each other’s smells. To test this, she recruited twenty pairs of “click friends”, and told them to: stop eating foods like garlic and onions, lay off aftershave and deodorant, bathe with unscented soap, put on a fresh lab-provided T-shirt, sleep in it to get it good and smelly and give it to the scientists. After they got the smelly T-shirts, Inbal and her scientist friends used an electronic nose to assess the chemicals rising in each T-shirt. The interesting thing is, that the friend’s odors were similar to each other than those of strangers.
Ravreby and her colleagues performed another study that continued to test this theory. To do that they got twenty-five other volunteers to play the mirroring game in pairs, copying each other’s movements. Then they filled out questionaries to see if they felt a connection. The similarities of their odors predicted whether both felt there had been a positive connection 71 percent of the time. After that experiment, the team is looking into modifying people’s body odor to see if subjects that who’ve been made to smell alike bond.
Article:Does Your Nose Help Pick Your Friends_ – The New York Times.pdf
But can our nose help us pick our friends? Inbal Ravreby, a graduate student in the lab of Noam Sobel (an olfaction researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel) was curious whether very swift friendships had an olfactory component, like picking up similarities in each other’s smells. To test this, she recruited twenty pairs of “click friends”, and told them to: stop eating foods like garlic and onions, lay off aftershave and deodorant, bathe with unscented soap, put on a fresh lab-provided T-shirt, sleep in it to get it good and smelly and give it to the scientists. After they got the smelly T-shirts, Inbal and her scientist friends used an electronic nose to assess the chemicals rising in each T-shirt. The interesting thing is, that the friend’s odors were similar to each other than those of strangers.
Ravreby and her colleagues performed another study that continued to test this theory. To do that they got twenty-five other volunteers to play the mirroring game in pairs, copying each other’s movements. Then they filled out questionaries to see if they felt a connection. The similarities of their odors predicted whether both felt there had been a positive connection 71 percent of the time. After that experiment, the team is looking into modifying people’s body odor to see if subjects that who’ve been made to smell alike bond.
Article:Does Your Nose Help Pick Your Friends_ – The New York Times.pdf
