We Induced Smells With Ultrasound (writetobrain.com)

Super interesting! That would make sense, because a lot of the nose is presumably dedicated to smelling evolutionarily-relevant smells, most of which are "smells bad, avoid this". The method is very crude right now, but maybe with more fine-grained targetting we could better tune the smell profile.

I wonder if we search for the worst smell, via optimization, is does this make it a big, not very steep optimum? Or maybe all unknown smells are a little bad, but the worst smell is some familiar badness.

You literally give them write access to your brain every time you interact with social media.

Woah I didn't know about that theory, that's really interesting! If I understand correctly, it's that the ligand needs to both fit "physically" and also have the right vibrational mode to have high binding affinity / trigger the receptor? Sounds like the relevant frequencies would be in IR range, or roughly 10-100 terahertz. We're at 300 kHz, so 9 orders of magnitude lower, so we're likely not activating the receptors directly with that mechanism. But, maybe the acoustic radiation force from the ultrasound gives existing molecules in the air enough energy to increase the coupling? And nobody seems to really know how ultrasound neurostimulation really works, so who knows—maybe something similar even happens with neurotransmitters in cortex...

Imagine how big of a stink the linter would put up as you worked on your most recent codebase!

Imagine the viruses and pranks.

Not joking, my mom has asked me every year since I became a "tech person" when I am going to make smellovision. This is perfect for her.

I am still waiting for the Smell Blaster.

Smells really get embedded into your conscience from early days. I remember as a kid really loving the "Smell-O-Vision" movie they had set up at La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris. As you watched they had little aerosol cans labeled with different scents ("baking bread" etc) that a mechanism would squirt towards the viewer.

I found this History of Smell-O-Vision paper too today:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7691926/

Lev also found vestibular! Email or dm him on twitter :)

Sorry it's unclear in the post, they weren't exactly the same! The numbers reported were on Lev, and we swept them around that range for me (Albert). But we didn't take down the exact values, so unfortunately I don't know how similar the maps were. iirc they were pretty different.

Certainly! We didn't get a chance to test it on more people before we had to take it apart, but we thought the result was too cool to share. Would love to see other folks run with the idea!

Ha, nope. We needed something to stabilize the probe and the plastic knife from lunch was within reach :)

A scary concept... I think the hardest part would be coupling the ultrasound through the air. But there are probably solutions..

This is absolutely my question as well - curious if it's legal to do this, I'm guessing yes as it's an existing ultrasound device? But is there possibility of permanent damage?

It's objectively cool, but very curious about the safety as well.