Die unglaubliche Wahrheit über unseren Geruchssinn (Wie wir permanent von der Nase gesteuert werden)

Hi, I'm Alex, I'm a health advisor and today I'm summarizing the three-hour podcast by Andrew Huberman for you by talking to Dr. Sobel about the fascinating world of our sense of smell. It may not sound so fascinating at first, but I can tell you that this podcast episode has almost 2 million views for a reason. As always, you can download my complete PDF summary via the first link in the description. I do this for all summaries here on my channel, so if you don't want to miss any, just subscribe to the channel. First of all, the question of how our sense of smell works at all. I'll make it very simple. We have a tissue on the lid of our nasal cavity called the smell epithelium and it contains about 7-10 million sense cells. When we breathe in, molecules from the air come into contact with these sense cells and they then send a signal to the brain or the smell pulse and we perceive that as a smell. We would be able to achieve this difference. Absolutely absurd if you think about it. Another example that also underlines this enormous ability of our nose is an experiment that was carried out by Dr. Sobel and his laboratory a few years ago. In this experiment, a string soaked in fragrance was buried under the ground and the participants had to try to find this string only through the smell. The participants then closed their eyes and ears and crawled over the ground. And almost everyone managed to find this string. I find it extremely exciting. If you want to hear this in the podcast, you can do it at about minute 36. Now to the topic of how smells permanently influence our behavior without us really noticing it. I have taken out the four most impressive examples from the podcast. First, we have an extremely exciting study from Dr. Sobel that investigated how we subconsciously try to classify people by smell after a stroke. The participants were put in a waiting room with the belief that the experiment would start immediately. The experiment was already in full swing and the participants were also filmed. Very interesting recordings were made here, which first show how often we actually touch our faces with our hands and fingers. And not just to scratch us or something, but actually to smell at our fingers. This also plays a very important role for the choice of the sexual partner. It could be shown in both animals and humans that the body's own smell plays an extremely important role in choosing a partner. And this is not just about whether someone stinks or not, but also about very subtle smells. Our body odor provides a certain degree of closure via the configuration of our immune system. And we usually prefer partners who are as far away from our immune system as possible or have as few similarities with our immune system as possible. It is assumed that it makes sense for evolutionary reasons, because then the children have a higher probability of having a robust and broadly structured immune system. Of course, this is now very layman-like, but I think the point is clear. And it is assumed that the pregnant mouse does not want to waste its resources with pregnancy if it can assume that the male mouse will not take care of the babies and may even kill them. This is due to the fact that there are indications that women who have more miscarriages tend to be able to recognize their partners much better by the smell. So there seems to be some kind of correlation here too. And you can try it out now. You can hold a nostril and inhale and do the same with the other nostril. You will notice that you get better air through one nostril. And that's because of the nose cycle. Which of course does not mean that it is impossible, but so far it has not been proven that you can consciously control it.