Hyper Dimensions in Olfactory Space

Artwork by Alex Grey

The title of this post is named after an article about categorizing smells, although it would work just as well as the title of a work of science fiction. It's from last August 2018, so it's old news by now; but that title isn't getting old anytime soon.

Probing the interconnected-ness of odors, and sketching a map of an omnicategorical odor network, the article starts out with a basic premise.

Let's say the olfactory system is designed to warn us of poisons in the environment. But a poison could be many chemicals, or a chemical we've never encountered before. So it would be necessary for the odors of those chemicals to be classified not by features intrinsic to the chemicals themselves, but by the likelihood of their co-occurrence with other chemicals. You can't be born with a database of chemicals to recognize and avoid. So instead, the hypothesis here is that an odor is only identified in its relationship to the other odors it's with.

This idea, at least to my ears, sounds really similar to the way statistical correlation text analysis can determine whether a piece of writing was written by a robot or not. (Also called visual forensics.)

It's way easier to visualize, so I'm taking these three images from the paper itself:

In the above 3 images, the first is a chunk of text written by a robot (most of the words are green, with a few yellows sprinkled in), the second is a real New York Times article (only half is green, the rest is yellow, with some red, and a sprinkle of purple) and the third picture is a clip from "the most unpredictable human text ever written", James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (the colors green, yellow, red, purple are all evenly distributed about the page).

Green words are very predictably the next word. Yellow words are less likely to show up after the word they show up after. And red and purple are for when the next word is something you absolutely did not expect.

Because text-writing algorithms today use a statistical correlation program based on a compendium of written language (so they know what words typically occur together, and can therefore sound more like a normal person) the output of such algos will tend to look like the topmost image with all green words. Very predictable. The algos can't think for themselves, they can't "come up with" new stuff, and they can't be unpredictable. The whole point of writing an algorithm to do this is to prescribe what it's going to do in advance, i.e., it's predictable.

Bringing this back to olfaction, unfortunately there isn't a compendium of odor associations such as a Bible for smells or an encyclopedia for volatile organic compounds in nature. Furthermore, even if there were, we would need to augment it with a companion encyclopedia of the odors in the anthroposphere, because your supermarket isn't "nature" and yet it organizes a whole lot of our daily scentscape. One day though.

Notes:

Hyperbolic geometry of the olfactory space.

Yuansheng Zhou, Brian H. Smith, Tatyana O. Sharpee

Science Advances  29 Aug 2018: Vol. 4, no. 8, eaaq1458

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaq1458

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaaq1458

Catching a Unicorn with GLTR: A tool to detect automatically generated text.

Hendrik Strobelt and Sebastian Gehrmann. Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations. Florence, Italy. July 2019. DOI:10.18653/v1/P19-3019

http://gltr.io

Spaced Out

Because of its key role in navigation, odor-detection and spatialization go hand-in-hand. A paper from McGill's Department of Psychiatry and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute gives evidence to support this relationship.

The hippocampus, which is the central location where spatial memories are "stored," is a key part of the olfactory system. The two – space and smell – are so closely related that they can become difficult to disentangle.

There is a great philosophical essay about the ontogeny of a salamander (see Hosek and Freeman below) in which a creature develops its identity (if questionably-sentient creatures can be said to do so) by way of olfaction. This creature, as with many others, interfaces its environment primarily by smell, especially in the beginnings of its life. The decisions that it makes then are in response to olfactory information, which through iterated reinforcement forms the foundation of its self.

I was so impressed by this idea that I was compelled to write a short essay myself about space, information and dimensionality, as narrated via the odyssey of the Eukaryote evolving through the epochs to its present-day instantiation as a self-aware human. It can be read here.

***

On this relationship between navigation and olfaction, I am reminded of a comment I received more than once when I was first telling folks about my book on smells – "What is it about architects and smells?" I studied both architecture and olfaction, and apparently, I'm not the only one.

That was something I couldn't answer at the time; I had never heard about it. As I began to meet more people involved in an olfactory occupation, be it writing about fragrance or designing olfactory experiences, I did notice a few interdisciplinary architects scattered among them.

Now it occurs to me quite clearly – architects are not experts at navigation so much as spatial perception in general, and specifically on moving through space. Whereas the painter is concerned with the way the eyes move through two dimensions, and the sculptor thinks about eyes moving in 3-D, the architect is concerned with the moving body.

The late architect Michael Graves made this the thrust of his speech as he opened his own School of Public Architecture at New Jersey's Kean University in 2015(ish?) – he told us that in designing a building, the human scale is the only one that matters. The way we feel in a space is the primary criterion when evaluating it. If you think about it, a building is like a body for our body.

***

Architects don’t have to learn much about proprioception, but maybe they should. Proprioception is the feeling that we have of our own bodies, where the parts are, how they're related, what they're doing, and whether we should move them out of the way of danger. (Anybody ever see the hand-smashing phantom limb trick? This is a good example of the power of proprioception.)

As we move through a building, our proprioception recognizes and records not only our own bodies, but the “bigger body” that we're in, whether it’s a building or a backyard. Before there was such a thing as architects or buildings (i.e., before we were human), we used olfaction as a way to calibrate our proprioception, and to navigate this bigger body that we’re in.

It seems I’ve done a pretty good job of navigating myself into the part of this post that I now have no idea how to get out, so I’ll have to leave it there. Architecture and olfaction make a good pair.

Notes:

Good spatial memory? You're likely to be good at identifying smells too

Oct 2018, phys.org

Louisa Dahmani et al, An intrinsic association between olfactory identification and spatial memory in humans, Nature Communications (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06569-4

Hosek R J & Freeman W J (2001). Osmetic Ontogenesis, or Olfaction Becomes You: The Neurodynamic, Intentional Self and Its Affinities with the Foucaultian/Butlerian Subject. Configurations 9: 509–541.

Michael Graves College

School of Public Architecture, Kean University

The Rubber Hand Illusion

BBC, 2010