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Comment by nmarinov | Hacker News Reader

The first mention of this indeed does not specify that both are odorless but the second sentence does:

> Before playing the game, the participants sniffed either female tears or a saline solution – both are odorless – but were not told what they were sniffing.

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If both are actually odorless then what's the mechanism? Magic?

Obviously if there is any effect then the tears aren't actually odorless.

Carbon Monoxide is odorless, but it’s effects are still real and well-understood.

If they think it's being absorbed through the lungs then they should plug the subjects noses and have them inhale instead of sniffing it. But that's a far fetched assumption. Assuming the effect is real at all, it's almost certainly chemical detection through the nose. That's odor. That's why they had the subjects sniff it, because they obviously suspect that it's based on odor.

Let’s be real here. You were wrong and now trying to double down on the idea that odor isn’t detectable unless moving ingress into nostrils.

Just wait until they find out that you can smell and taste with things other than your nose and mouth.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130710-how-our-organs-s...

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to smell it, does it make an odor?

Well, the chemicals are there, but nobody's there to interpret them as an odor... so sort of yes?

If tears are being detected by the brain, it's through chemicals from the tears traveling through the air and landing on sensors in your nose (or mouth); that is odor. If there is some mechanism other than odor by which humans might distinguish tears them from saline solution after sniffing them, please tell me.

Odors also being detected with your tongue is irrelevant trivia which doesn't alter my conclusion. Sound can be heard through your chest but that's irrelevant trivia when somebody says "if there's no air to transmit pressure waves to your ears then there's no sound." Sound is transmitted through pressure waves in the air, and odors are transmitted through chemicals in the air. If you're hearing them with your ears or chest or smelling them with your nose or mouth makes no difference, the fact that any detection is evidently taking place shows that there is sound or odor involved. Furthermore, the researchers obviously suspect that the mechanism of detection is odor because they asked their subjects to sniff it. You don't ask subjects to sniff a thing unless you suspect odor of being involved. If researchers were studying the perception of magnetic fields, they wouldn't ask people to sniff the fields.

Again, if there is any other plausible mechanism for detection, then tell me. Otherwise, stop wasting my time.

>Assuming the effect is real at all, it's almost certainly chemical detection through the nose. That's odor.

No, odor is a perceived smell. UV and IR both interact with the eye without being visible, so there's no good reason to insist that it's impossible for chemicals with no smell to interact with the nose.

When chemicals float through the air into your nose or mouth and get detected by your brain, that's odor. Conscious perception or unconscious emotional reaction makes no difference, both are odor. If there are no chemicals being emitted or they have no reaction to your nose and your nose doesn't change the signals it's sending to your brain, then you can fairly say it has no odor.

To say that odors aren't odors unless they are consciously perceived is like saying UV isn't light because you don't consciously perceive it. Except it's the same physical phenomena, electromagnetic radiation or chemicals floating through the air, your sensory organs are detecting it (mostly being destroyed by it in the case of UV, but probably not in the case of tear odor...) and your brain is reacting to it even though you don't consciously realize it.

>To say that odors aren't odors unless they are consciously perceived is like saying UV isn't light because you don't consciously perceive it

No, I'm saying that EM doesn't produce colors unless it's visible light. What you're saying is that not only are cold, pressure, and pain flavors, so are any additional effects on satiety or insulin response or whatever triggered by any interaction with receptors on the tongue.

That's a different definition of odor than commonly accepted. If you can't consciously perceive it, it's not an odor. Just like you can't see the TV remote shine a bright infrared light. We don't call TV remotes flashlights, because we can't perceive infrared. If we can't consciously perceive a smell, it's described as odorless.

> That's odor

That’s not odor. Odor is perceivable.

If, let’s say for sake of argument, this study’s hypothesis is that the effect is caused by pheromones, then by definition it’s odorless.

In fact, one of the inherent challenges of trying to study this effect between humans is that the participants need to be clean and odorless, to ensure you’re actually measuring the effects of pheromones and not, say, odor. This review talks about this challenge[0].

0: https://www.ejog.org/article/S0301-2115(04)00474-9/fulltext

You nose detects it and your brain reacts to it; it's odor. Just because you don't consciously perceive it doesn't mean it isn't odor. If it isn't odor then there isn't any other good word for it.

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