Rachel Herz Talks About Smell (BSP 34)

Episode 34 of the Brain Science Podcast is an interview with Rachel Herz, author of The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell (2007).  Dr. Herz teaches at Brown University, and she is a leading authority on the psychology of smell.  We talk about the how smell works, its role in emotion and memory, why it is so vulnerable, and why smell is much more important than most of us realize.  We also consider some of the questions that remain unanswered.

How to get this episode:

  • Premium Subscribers now have unlimited access to all old episodes and transcripts.

  • Buy mp3 for $1.

  • Buy Transcript for $1.

  • New episodes of the Brain Science Podcast are always FREE.  All episodes posted after January 1, 2013, are free.  See the individual show notes for links the audio files.

Listen in your Favorite Audio app: Audible, Amazon music, Pandora, Spotify, YouTube and many more.

Links and References:

Rachel Herz:

The 2004 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology was awarded to Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck for their discoveries of "odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system."

BuckL, Axel R.: "A novel multigene family may encode odorant receptors: a molecular basis for odor recognition."

Cell. 1991 Apr 5;65(1):175-87.

"The (Shocked) Nose Knows" by Gisela Telis Science NOW Daily News 27 March 2008.

The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell (2007), by Rachel Herz

Donations and Subscriptions are appreciated