Tasting Rainbows

We typically think of the senses as being pretty discrete. Sure you can ‘feel a bright color,’ or ‘see a loud necktie,’ but we mostly consider the senses to be separate (unless we’re on acid, or sleep-deprived, or Salvadore Dali). Here’s an example to the contrary, where a photoreceptor gene was found hanging out with a bunch of taste genes. News like this makes us reconsider what it means to see, to hear, and to sense the world in general.

Tasting light: New type of photoreceptor is 50 times more efficient than the human eye

Nov 2016, phys.org

“The new receptor protein, LITE-1, was found among a family of taste receptors in invertebrates [i.e. insects]”

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Don’t forget the guy who can see with his tongue. Taste the rainbow!

The Acid Test

Cooking with Dice: The Acid Test

Just when you thought a role playing game fortified with immersive scent-explorations was 'out-there' as far as gaming goes, the creator of Adventure Scents have now come up with a new idea, even more multimodal than their last.

This time we're looking at Cooking with Dice: The Acid Test, a ‘classic RPG with a delicious twist,’ and in other words, a Gamified Cookbook.

What the hell is a gamified cookbook? It’s half cookbook, half role playing game. The Cooking with Dice system uses elements of traditional tabletop role-playing games to turn your kitchen into an adventure zone

Your character tries to level up to the esteemed Chef de Cuisine by executing recipes concocted by a roll of the dice. What's interesting here is that the recipes don't use heat, but acid (like the chemical-reaction-acid, not the kind of acid that melts your face off). You make things like pickles, jam, ceviche, .... No fire-breathing dragons necessary.

If this is anything like the last offer from Jennifer Howlett, Adventure Scents creator and game guru extraordinaire, Cooking with Dice is guaranteed to be an adventure of multisensory complexities.

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I can’t help but zero-in on the way this game is ultimately played, which is by fostering chemical reactions that turn raw ingredients into edible adventures. First of all, it’s genius for a kids’ cookbook – they get to “cook” and yet they don’t even have to play with fire.

Next of all, it totally reminds me of The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz, which won the 2013 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference and Scholarship, which pretty much blew my mind when I read it. If you think you know what it means to be human and yet you haven’t read it, maybe you should. The idea of offloading the work of digestion to bacteria that exist outside our bodies, so that our bodies can do more important things – like thinking – is nuts. (It also helps to put in perspective the development of cooking and human digestion – where fermentation is the accelerating of a metabolic process via bacteria, cooking is the same but by fire. One is a kind of biological heat, and the other a more basic, chemical heat.) Anyway, fermentation is cool, and I think Jennifer Howlett is one smart cookie for coming up with this workaround for a kids’ (gamified) cookbook.

Finally, the ‘acid test,’ as she calls it, is essential to understanding the world of smell, because smell is a bacterial thing, a microbial thing. You cannot smell chlorine, or ammonia, or sulfur (these are single chemicals and we can’t smell that kind of thing). What you smell are biological reactions involving these chemicals, and which have created through their reactions more complex organic molecules that we can smell. Metal does not smell; “the smell of metal” is bacteria that live on our hands and in our sweat, reacting with metal to create new compounds that smell “like metal.” Understanding acids and how they work is the foundation for chemistry, and this gamified cookbook is a synaesthetically satisfying way of getting to know chemistry and the smells that come from it.

Check it out!

And while you’re at it, if you’re ever looking for that perfect ‘moldy dungeon’ smell or the smell of the breath of a fire-breathing dragon, check out Adventure Scents.

Revealing Salient Features of the Smell Network

aka On Sweetness and Flowers

pdf screenshot: Aldrich's Flavors and Fragrances Catalog, 2013. "Organoleptic properties index", pp145-169. 

If you work in the Flavor and Fragrance Industry, chances are you use the Sigma Aldrich catalog to reference the chemicals, the raw materials, of your craft. Sigma Aldrich produces and procures about 1,000 ‘smellable’ chemicals for distribution among the Industry.

It is the nature of volatile organic compounds (‘smellable’ molecules) that the same units can be used to make a variety of aromas. Although there are only 1,000 chemicals, they are indexed by over 3,000 descriptors, such as smoky, anise, spicy, or rose. One does not search for the chemical Geraniol, but instead looks up “Rose”, under the super-category Floral, and there will be Geraniol, along with all other chemicals used to intimate the aromatic impression of a rose. Further collapsing these roughly 3,000 descriptors into more general categories, again there is redundancy. The aromatic descriptor “Lemon” is categorized under the Citrus as well as the Woody groups.

Of all these descriptors, “Sweet” is the most redundant; it is repeated in four different groups, more than any other descriptor. In network science parlance, this is called centrality, or betweenness. Thus, Sweet has a higher centrality value than any other descriptor. It is a kind of glue, a hub, which holds the network together. (This is a flavor and fragrance catalog, after all.)

Using Sweet as a locus, a modified aroma network can be configured. Within this “Sweet network”, every super-category that contains Sweet as a descriptor is present. (Note that the chemical indexed by “Sweet” in one grouping, such as Fruity, does not necessarily refer to the same chemical as the “Sweet” in the Balsamic group.) The related super-categories that share Sweet as one of their descriptors, they happen to be the most ‘copiously described’ groups. Fruity has 850 descriptors, the most of any group. Balsamic has 540.

This revelation is becoming somewhat anti-climatic, as it would be expected that the more descriptors a group has, the more likely it would share one of those descriptors with another group. But what is this? If we look down, at the third-most populated grouping – Floral, at 296 – we see that it is absent from the Sweet network. If groupings with many descriptors tend to contain Sweet, and Floral has many descriptors, then it should also contain Sweet. It does not.

In the first place, Sweet is not a smell, it is a taste. But this is a flavor and fragrance catalog, you retort. But what then about sour, salty, bitter, and savory? They do not exhibit the same centrality as sweetness. Next, we do not eat flowers. In fact, a major part of the profile of a “floral” note is the smell of shit – not the most gustatorily satisfying of aromas.

The corpus of the Sigma Aldrich smell network is highly complex in its structure and associations, with stable patterns found few and far between. No matter the corpus, throughout history such has been the same for smells. At least for one of its infinite configurations, it can be observed that Sweetness and Flowers are very distinct entities in the aromasphere: We do not eat Flowers, and we do not smell Sweet.

Adventure Scents

screenshot from adventurescents.com 

Ah, the rewards of a random internet perusal. I found here a place where you can buy smells to enhance your game-playing. This unique business was founded by a former special education teacher who was looking to add a multisensory experience to game playing. It's hard to find scents for Dragon's Lair and Abandoned Castle on the market, so she started hand-crafting her own. Now players can enhance their board games, RPGs and LARPs.

I’ll take this directly from the site:

SMELL THIS!

“The Adventure Scents line contains funky fragrances based on common adventure locations. We've got your fandom covered with themes from fantasy, science fiction, historical, modern action, and horror.”

You can order Dusty Attic, Ancient Library, Desert Caravan, or Fairgrounds: “Behind the cheerful façade of kettle corn, cotton candy and funnel cakes, lies a dark and twisted secret.”

What I find most interesting is the way they allow you to search for your product – they offer you a handful of "search strategies" such as by adventure location or by a costume. These are useful ways of categorizing smells, but you would never see this in any other market.

And then, they list other ways to enhance your games, including Jelly Belly. It's funny to see, in a world where virtual reality is no longer around the corner but right in front of our face, that the ways to heighten our fantasy experiences are multifaceted and multisensory, not to mention – pretty low-tech, considering.

Multimodal Crosstalk

Make it stop.

Got an article here in Wired where we learn about how we taste, and about how we sense everything, really. The brain doesn’t see sensory information as sense-specific, it processes everything together. In the article, psychologist Charles Spence relates it to signal processing – the brain has to process all the signals to figure out what’s good and what’s not. And what we get back is not raw sensory input; instead all the signals interfere with each other, distorting and reshaping each other. Changing the color of white wine to red makes people “taste” red wine. Changing the lights in a room makes you “hear” differently. Senses even distort themselves. White noise makes other noises seem further away; it distorts the aural space of the listener (see Beckerman below).

I bring up all of this because, why, our sense of smell is the most obvious candidate for proving the multi-modal sensory processing of our brains. Smells can be Sharp, Sour, or Green. In fact, smell is one sense that we do not experience as its own. All of the words we use to describe smells come from other senses; and it can be argued that we only experience smell by proxy of the other senses. Perhaps it is too primitive of a phenomenon to translate to the cognizant, self-reflective human – it is the first sense, after all, and made its appearance on the Tree of Life with the Vertebrates, and hence with brains (the two go together).

Lost in Translation

Notes:

Your Senses Are Talking Behind Your Back

Brendan Cole, Wired, July 2016

Professor Charles Spence, at Oxford, studies applied cognitive psychology, consumer psychology, sensory marketing, and multisensory perception. And that would make him a man of interest here at Limbic Signal. He also deals a lot with the future of food.

The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy. Joel Beckerman. 2014.

On Interdisciplinary Studies

Microsoft’s Non-Non-Gendered Chatbot, Tay, 2016

 

To study the “language of smell” is to thread together the studies of many other fields. As a subject, the language of smell can spread into territories from proprioception to civil engineering. Regarding contemporary problems, the study of language and olfaction together can instigate new insight into fields like artificial intelligence, and even prompt questions about what it means to be human in the face of a technologically immersive world.

The olfactory bulb is a model neural network, and one that has scientists stumped still today. Despite having reverse-engineered vision, hearing, and even tactile sensation, nobody knows how to artificially code olfaction. After the brain tendrils in your nose are activated, the next stop at the olfactory bulb turns those signals into a buffet of information to be processed by the limbic system and rendered into an olfactory experience. That interchange at the olfactory bulb is still shrouded in mystery, but its neuronal architecture very closely resembles the layered networks used in artificial intelligence and machine learning today. (These are also called deep learning networks.)

As these forms of artificial intelligence become more pervasive, we are forced to reckon with what it means to be human vs machine. Already, with the need for non-gendered intelligentities (note Microsoft’s recent chatbot, which twitter turned into the dregs of society within 24 hours, was a “teenage girl,” not to say that it wouldn’t have been more successful if it was non-gendered, just that I was surprised when she was debuted that she was a definitive “she”), with advances in artificial reality simulation, in neural-interfaced prosthetic bodyparts and biocomputing insectobots, we are daily being asked which parts of “being alive” we want to keep, and which ones we want to offload to our [eventual overlords , jk].

To investigate both what it means to smell something, and how we communicate that experience, is to dive deep into the human, beyond the thinking parts and into the limbic, the emotional, animal parts.  These parts are so far inside our phylogenetic history that it’s hard to bring them to light in an age of so much knowingness and clarity. And to articulate these parts requires something less of a science and more of an art, which is exactly where the language of smell falls on the spectrum of functionality. (No wonder stuff like this gets no funding…see below.)

From a recent article on interdisciplinary research, an echo :

"One of the biggest advantages of interdisciplinary research is that it can generate new ways of looking at existing problems," said Professor Bromham, from the ANU Research School of Biology.

-phys.org

Notes:

Despite advantages, cross-discipline research has a lower chance of receiving funding

phys.org, July 2016