The Smell Summit (cinnamon buns, jelly beans, and death)

Today, the world's top odor scientists are gathering in Huntington Beach, California (Orange County) for the 35th annual meeting of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences. When odor researchers get together, they often talk about flavor, and so it is no surprise that the conference is sponsored by Pepsico, which owns Pepsi, Frito Lay, Tropicana, Quaker, and Gatorade. The other top sponsor is probably less well known, except among food scientists -- Givaudan, the Swiss flavor and fragrance concocters, in whose labs the hundreds of chemical odor compounds that mingle in every flavor are dissected, analyzed, and recombined intro wondrous new combinations (like a picanha*-flavored potato chip).

In chapter four of Mind Over Mind, "Accounting for Taste," I write about how the odor of food and drink wraps our sense of taste and our taste preferences in layers of expectations and emotional associations. Much of the research to be presented at the smell-science meeting speaks to effects of different smells on the brain and the impacts of cognitive impairment, such as Alzheimer's and autism,  on smell and taste. One panel discussion focuses on how different tastes signal the production of gut peptides that regulate how hungry we feel and how much we subsequently eat. And then there are the more esoteric topics, which I share here for your reading pleasure:

"The Effects of Aroma of Baked Cinnamon Bun on Stability"; "Tests of Retronasal Smell in Children: Which Flavored Jelly Bean Works Best?"; "Temperature of Served Water Can Influence Sensory Perception and Acceptance of Subsequent Food."

And my favorite, due to its creepiness: "Three-Minute Smell Test Predicts Risk of Death" in which University of Chicago researchers measured the sense of smell of about 3,000 older people and then followed up with them for five years. Independent of major mortality risk factors such as smoking or disease, the people with a poor sense of smell were three times more likely to be dead in five years than those with a normal sense of smell. Sniff.

*picanha is a Brazilian term for a fatty, salty morsel of grilled beef 

Wait!

Today's topic is delay.....

Two recent studies from the journal Psychological Science offer surprising insights into when and why our brains say, "not so fast."

The first one, from researchers at USC's Marshall School of Business, suggests that power makes people more willing to say no to a cash offered right now, if it means they can get more money later. The behavior under study is called "temporal discounting" -- the tendency for people to prefer a smaller reward to a larger one, if that means they get it now instead of waiting (beyond the point where inflation, etc would wash out any difference in real value) -- we shortchange our future selves. In four experiments, these researchers showed that giving people a temporary boost in power (making them the "boss" in a group activity) made them more willing to wait for more money.

Crazy, right? Doesn't power override inhibitions and whet one's appetite for risk? Yes, say the study's authors, but it also seems to increase people's affinity with their future selves. For one thing, they write, "Power engenders a sense of control and optimism, reducing the uncertainty associated with the future [which is] one of the causes of temporal discounting." Indeed, the effect of power on reward choice was mediated by how close people reported feeling to their future selves in a questionnaire. In a survey study done outside the lab, people who reported feeling more powerful in their daily lives also reported saving a lot more for retirement, even controlling for factors such as income. age, and education.

The second study, by a group of British researchers, finds a mind-body link in inhibitions. When offered a series of gambles, people were more risk averse when they were occasionally prompted to stop making a simple movement that was otherwise part of the experiment (i.e. pressing the spacebar after choosing their wager). It wasn't that people who stopped their thumbs from hitting the space bar stopped gambling altogether. "Occasional motor inhibition reduced monetary risk taking by approximately 10% to 15%," the researchers note. But, the results suggest a general inhibition system in the brain, and, more generally, that inhibition can be enhanced with practice.

Did He Need to Cheat?

Lance Armstrong has finally admitted that he cheated his way to seven Tour de France titles. The confessional interview with Oprah Winfrey (part one last night and part two tonight) is big news, even if it's not exactly shocking.

     Mostly, it's sad, of course. Sad that the sport of cycling has lost its biggest icon and its last "real" champion. Sad for the many people Armstrong lied to and lied about to protect his name. Sad for the overall message of inspiration he seemed to embody. And I'll add one more sad note: There are serious doubts now being raised about whether the effectiveness of all that Erythropoietin (EPO) that Armstrong and his fellow top-tier cyclists pumped into their blood.

     To be clear, EPO (a hormone that enhances the body's production of red blood cells) is not the only thing Armstrong injected to boost his performance. Other banned substances he admitted using include human growth hormone and testosterone. But EPO has become the illicit drug of choice for endurance athletes looking for an edge. That's because it is believed to increase the blood's ability to carry oxygen and thereby increase the athlete's aerobic power. Indeed, one recent review found that EPO boosts the maximum oxygen uptake by 6 to 9 percent.

     But does EPO really boost athletic performance? Not according to a 2012 meta-analysis of EPO studies published by the British Medical Journal, which found "no scientific basis to conclude [EPO] has performance enhancing properties in elite cyclists." For one thing, the study's authors pointed out that there are other measures that may be even more important to elite athletic perform, such as "lactate threshold" (the point when lactate production increases faster than it can be cleared by the body), that EPO has not been shown to improve. Plus, the hormone is also known to thicken the blood, making the heart work harder (this increase of blood viscosity also increases the risk of blood clots, heart attacks and strokes), which might work against endurance.

     Armstrong's reputation is in ruins. He's been stripped of his titles, banned from the sport to which he devoted his life, and shunned by the cancer charity Livestrong that he founded. All because he (and so many of his competitors) felt the need to cheat. Topping off this shame pile is the possibility that he and many others might have raced just as fast without EPO.