We Induced Smells With Ultrasound
writetobrain.com
writetobrain.com
Don't get me wrong, I would love this finding to be replicable, it would be pivotal as what other nerves could we stimulate to change perception (think pain, mental health issues, loss of senses).
Also, I wonder if this could take us closer to understand a little bit more of how the brain works. Like this could be a great way for normalizing 'inputs' and see how different brains react to it.
Very very exciting news, but I will hold on my hype until someone else can replicate this result.
These are exactly the types of smells people report when they get head CT scans (I've experienced it myself). Always thought it was ozone forming but perhaps it's more interesting than that.
This reminds me a bit of the escherian staircase video from 10+ years that went viral. A bunch of college students walking down the stairs, acting amazed when they found themselves back at the top. It was great acting and video editing, but it was fake and all part of, if I recall correctly, an art project.
I don't want to dismiss it outright either, seems cool as hell. But it's remarkable to me that all it takes is a blogpost to get this amount of uncritical acceptance of a demonstration.
I think this is cool, plausible and warrants investigation, but not suspension of disbelief. There needs to be a better way to go about this than responding "what about Galileo!?" to any principled application of critical thinking.
One has to set prejudice to the side and examine the claim being made to apply criticl thinking.
To be frank the reason that make me question it the most is how repetitive the redaction is. Seems LLM-like.
However, that's not a valid reason to discard an interesting result.
These are big scientific claims, but the work is clearly too premature to make those conclusions, and it lacks the connection to prior work and peer review needed for making priority claims. It's really great hacker-tinkering work though, and it could turn into solid science if they take more care with it.
If this effect is real and truly novel, my cynical expectation is that someone already established in focused ultrasound will read this, apply a more rigorous approach, and get the recognition that they are hoping for through more establish channels.
It looks like independent hackers with a strong technical background and little regard for decorum.
Their methodology seems reasonable, and their results are plausible.
I’m reserved about the final part of the post where they moot about applications, but the core result seems solid. They elicited osmosphenes like one can elicit phosphènes by targeting the visual cortex.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_focused_ultrasoun...
There's quite a lot of research in this direction (stimulation, be it ultrasound or otherwise) to tackle exactly things you mention. Not completely sure but probably stimulators to suppress epilepsy are the most common. It has been proven in animal research stimulating the right area induces visual stimuli - IIRC this has been tested and confirmed in humans as well, i.e., make people see again. And there's more going on.
In the end: everything in the brain is electrical current. Meaning that in theory stimulating the right bits can do pretty much everything.
All: if you seen a particularly good submission that has fallen through the cracks, please email hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look and maybe put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random re-upment on HN's front page.
(Yes, it's permissible to request this for your own stuff, but we like it better when it's something you just ran across randomly and realized was interesting—as mmulet did in this case!)
Could I shoot you guys a message when I make my way down to Caltech to try this out someday? :)
If you get in contact with the researchers, please let us know how it went.
If they _lost_ their sense of smell, they had something to compare it with.
E.g. smelling something rancid for the first time - how strong of a negative reaction will it be compared to others who grew up with this negative association. Would I ever even be able to map most of the smells others have memorized to their origin? I really hope I get to find out someday.
The smelloscope, right ?
I found this History of Smell-O-Vision paper too today:
Intriguingly some of the really unpleasant smells never get through to me - I could probably work at a sewage works now. Worryingly I have next to no ability to smell burning, though I do now get the smell of natural gas (or the additive used to make it smell).
In addition to this, I sometimes smell scents that do not exist.
It makes sense for unclassified to smell worse than good, and it'd probably be the biggest category by a long stretch.
(Pure speculation.)
porn + vr + smell
The porn industry has historically been very quick to adopt new technologies, it's easy to see how this could benefit that industry, so it's a logical enough conclusion to draw. They'll very likely be the first commercial application of this, once viable.
This is coming from a place of physical discontent, not moral discontent.
Is it still shitposting if it actually smells nice?
I don't think I'm ready for this technology
On the other hand, I see an opportunity even without tech: porn star perfume collabs: Spray some Gukki Bloom and press play on that video to smell what the star was wearing on the day.
But I guess high-end perfume brands don't want to be associated with actors of the flesh.
Well, if it’s waves, perhaps principles of consonance and dissonance might apply.
Robert Hooke thought so…
“Now as we find that musical strings will be moved by Unisons and Eighths, and other harmonious chords, though not in the same degree; so do I suppose that the particles of matter will be moved principally by such motions as are Unisons, as I may call them, or of equal Velocity with their motions, and by other har∣monious motions in a less degree.
I do further suppose, A subtil matter that incom∣passeth and pervades all other bodies, which is the Menstruum in which they swim which maintains and continues all such bodies in their motion, and which is the medium that conveys all Homogenious or Har∣monical motions from body to body.
Further I suppose, that all such particles of matter as are of a like nature, when not separated by others of a differing nature will remain together, and strengthen the common Vibration of them all against the differing Vibrations of the ambient bodies.
According to this Notion I suppose the whole Universe and all the particles thereof to be in a con∣tinued motion, and every one to take its share of space or room in the same, according to the bulk of its body, or according to the particular power it hath to receive, and continue this or that peculiar motion.
Two or more of these particles joyned immediately together, and coalescing into one become of another nature, and receptive of another degree of motion and Vibration, and make a compounded particle differing in nature from each of the other par∣ticles.
All bulky and sensible bodies whatsoever I suppose to be made up or composed of such particles which have their peculiar and appropriate motions which are kept together by the differing or dissonant Vibrations of the ambient bodies or fluid“
Page 9: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A44322.0001.001/1:3?rgn=di...
So, N=2 and the people in question are co-authors. I'm not in this business, but isn't this too... early to publish?
The issue is that lay people read every paper or post as if it were a final proclamation. They’re not. Even a peer reviewed paper on the cover of Science or Nature is still not “proof” of anything, science doesn’t produce positive confirmation. It produces evidence that taken together suggest one prior is more likely than another.
Bayes Rule is very intuitive. We update the prior by the likelihood of the evidence under a given prior divided by the likelihood of the evidence. That’s all it is.
Unfortunately, there is a very strong motive to flag plant. Academia is a water full of sharks.
“Of particular interest in the present context are the observations made on patients whose middle ear had been opened in such a way that a cotton electrode soaked in normal saline solution could be placed near the cochlea. A total of 20 surgically operated ears were studied. Eleven patients heard pure tones whose pitch corresponded to the frequency of the sinusoidal voltage applied to the electrode… One patient reported gustatory sensations.”
But actually it sort of makes sense since (from what I understand) is stimulating an external interface (the receptors), so you're mimicing what the effect a smell would have on you rather than the electrical signal created by the response to a stimulus?
These smells have everything: Harsh solvent-like stuff like strong alcohol or glue, rotten fish amines, off-sweet halocarbons, things like burnt plastics, excrement, or stuff that defies description as to their lingeringly terrible sensation of olfactory wrongness (selenium compounds).
There is actually a thing called "cadaverine", that should tell you enough.
Still, every sufficiently large storage space I rememebet had this identical, not unpleasant, thickly sweet, but not easily defined smell.
So to conclude, I think it's a brain glitch when we input everything, all the smells, at the same time.
<[SA]HatfulOfHollow> i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet
What are the chances baby ultrasounds are doing this unintentionally?
So, the pressures are high enough to be stimulating them! But most diagnostic imaging happens at 1-20 MHz, while most neurostimulation seems to occur at few-hundred kHz (we were at 300 kHz, on the mid-high end). So I don't think it's likely that babies are being sent smells?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
Me wonders if this can be applied to other parts of the brain, perhaps recalling long buried memories? In my case, "a 12‑lexeme mnemonic constellation that operates as a cognitive entropy incantation, each syllabic particle mapping onto a quantized shard of an authorization singularity’s randomness reservoir. This ordered cascade of linguistic quanta serves as a deterministic bootstrap constant, re‑materializing access to a distributed transactional continuum avatar via recursive derivation algorithms. In practice, it’s a compact neuro‑linguistic checksum spell, a bridge where human cortex patterns resonate with machine‑level information‑integrity archetypes, conjuring identity from chaos like a linguistic particle accelerator, aka ₿" ;)
> "We found different scents by steering the beam over ~14 mm (20 degrees at 4 cm radius). The distance between freshness and burning was ~3.5 mm."
> "The olfactory system potentially allows writing up to 400, if not 800 due to two nostrils, dimensions into the brain. That is comparable to the dimensionality of latent spaces of LLMs, which implies you could reasonably encode the meaning of a paragraph into a 400-dimensional vector. If you had a device which allows for this kind of writing, you could learn to associate the input patterns with their corresponding meanings. After that, you could directly smell the latent space."
This just makes me grin with total delight. Completely freaking fascinating.
Translation: We’re very concerned that the only projects getting funding right now have to use AI.
is this like some second meaning or smth?
why is there a knife on the headset?
Our fingertips feel using low frequency sound generated by our fingerprints passing over things.
Your TV will get a scent emitter, but Samsung will only activate it for their own ads. I'm not excited about the future of Glad trash bag ads.
......
...OH you probably mean for the purposes of stimulating things OTHER THAN SMELLS
i wonder if some kind of inhalable anesthetic would be a good control. ie, if the normal sensory pathways are blocked and the lifu stim of the olfactory bulb still creates the percept, then maybe it would be evidence that it is working as it appears...
This kind of tech should be developed as open-source projects, even for the firmware and hardware. A sufficiently advanced version of this, if widely deployed as proprietary blackboxes like smartphones are, would allow one consciousness to take over multiple bodies without their original owners knowing.
https://www.nhs.uk/pregnancy/your-pregnancy-care/ultrasound-...
> The scans are painless, have no known side effects on mothers or babies, and can be carried out at any stage of pregnancy.
If you read the linked article, you'd see that most of it focused on how extremely hard it was to get the ultrasound to do anything - it required an MRI and exact positioning of the ultrasound transducer. I doubt that 5 minutes of being gently prodded through the skin and fat is going to harm a child. Also, ultrasounds (and waves and radiation of all sorts) are passing into your body at all times, so it's not like they are exposing the fetus to something rare or unusual.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-nsc-commercial...
All this says is effectively "all screening carries risks such as false results and overdiagnosis, so people should carefully assess benefits, harms, evidence, and costs before choosing private tests".
Doing this via ultrasound might lower the barrier to treatment.
It's objectively cool, but very curious about the safety as well.
https://human.research.wvu.edu/fda-regulated-devices-used-in...
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9. Does FDA require IRB review and approval of off-label use of a legally marketed device?
...(unrelated for this conversation)...
Yes, when the off-label use of a legally marketed device is part of a research study collecting safety and effectiveness data involving human subjects, IRB review and approval is required (21 CFR 812.2(a)). For additional information on the off-label use of devices, see the FDA Information Sheet guidance, “ ‘Off-label’ and Investigational Use of Marketed Drugs, Biologics and Medical Devices.”