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On the dimensionality of odor space.

ABSTRACT: There is great interest in understanding human olfactory experience from a principled and quantitative standpoint. The comparison is often made to color vision, where a solid framework with a three-dimensional perceptual space enabled a rigorous search for the underlying neural pathways, and the technological development of lifelike color display devices. A recent, highly publicized report claims that humans can discriminate at least 1 trillion odors, which exceeds by many orders of magnitude the known capabilities of color discrimination. This claim is wrong. I show that the failure lies in the mathematical method used to infer the size of odor space from a limited experimental sample. Further analysis focuses on establishing how many dimensions the perceptual odor space has. I explore the dimensionality of physical, neural, and perceptual spaces, drawing on results from bacteria to humans, and propose some experimental approaches to better estimate the number of discriminable odors.

SUBMITTER: Meister M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4491593 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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On the dimensionality of odor space.

Meister Markus M

eLife 20150707

There is great interest in understanding human olfactory experience from a principled and quantitative standpoint. The comparison is often made to color vision, where a solid framework with a three-dimensional perceptual space enabled a rigorous search for the underlying neural pathways, and the technological development of lifelike color display devices. A recent, highly publicized report claims that humans can discriminate at least 1 trillion odors, which exceeds by many orders of magnitude th ...[more]

PMID: 26151672

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