Minty? Lemony? Humans Can Smell 10 Types of Odors

By By Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer | LiveScience.com – 8 hours ago

From fruity to minty to popcorn-y, all smells can be classified as one of 10 types of

aroma, scientists say.

Taste, vision and hearing can be quantified, but a systematic description of smell has

remained elusive. Now, researchers have used mathematics to describe odors

systematically and simplify them into 10 categories: fragrant, woody/resinous, fruity

(non-citrus), chemical, minty/peppermint, sweet, popcorn, lemon, pungent and

decayed.

"It's an open question how many fundamental types of odor qualities there are," study

researcher Jason Castro of Bates College said in a statement. "This is in striking

contrast to olfaction's 'sister sense,' taste, where we know that five basic qualities

seem to organize sensations," Castro said.

Castro and his colleagues took a standard database known as Andew Dravniek's 1985

Atlas of Odor Character Profiles. The profiles contained long lists of descriptors — such

as "sweet," "floral" or "heavy" — which people had rated in terms of applicability to

144 different odors.

Using statistics, the scientists determined which combinations of descriptors were the

key ones -- those used most often without being redundant. The technique was similar

to compressing a digital file, which reduces its size without sacrificing useful

information.

The analysis resulted in 10 basic odor groups. Why 10? It could also have been nine or

11, but 10 was the smallest number that still captured the interesting features of

smell, Castro said.

The group is now applying their methods to a bank of chemical structures to predict

how each chemical will smell. Nobody has been able to make this kind of prediction

accurately, Castro said, and he expects perfume and fragrance companies will take an

interest in it.

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