ArticleeLife2015
On the dimensionality of odor space.
Article in eLife, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed.
- Human pairs show collective benefit in olfactory perception despite individual differences and verbal limits.iScience · 2026Article
- Mouse olfactory system acts as anemo-detector and anemo-discriminator.Science advances · 2025Article
- Ex Vivo Functional Characterization of Mouse Olfactory Bulb Projection Neurons Reveals a Heterogeneous Continuum.eNeuro · 2025Article
- Odors as cognitive constructs: history of odor classification and attempts to map odor percepts to physical and chemical parameters.Chemical senses · 2025Review
- Survey of temporal coding of sensory information.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2025Article
- Taste enhances the ability to express a preference for a congruent odor in rats.Behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- A deep position-encoding model for predicting olfactory perception from molecular structures and electrostatics.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- What Does the Human Olfactory System Do, and How Does It Do It?Annual review of psychology · 2024Review
- Neural Circuits for Fast Poisson Compressed Sensing in the Olfactory Bulb.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Signal processing in the vagus nerve: Hypotheses based on new genetic and anatomical evidence.Biological psychology · 2023Review
- Physicochemical features partially explain olfactory crossmodal correspondences.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Functional imaging and quantification of multineuronal olfactory responses inScience advances · 2023Article
- Neural Circuits for Fast Poisson Compressed Sensing in the Olfactory Bulb.Advances in neural information processing systems · 2023Article
- A behavioral paradigm for measuring perceptual distances in mice.Cell reports methods · 2022Article
- Getting out the caliper: Behavioral quantification of perceptual odor similarity.Cell reports methods · 2022Article
- Spatiotemporal dynamics of odor representations in the human brain revealed by EEG decoding.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Transport features predict if a molecule is odorous.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- More than meets the AI: The possibilities and limits of machine learning in olfaction.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Review
- Neuroanatomical and Immunohistological Study of the Main and Accessory Olfactory Bulbs of the Meerkat (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Article
- Improving scalability in systems neuroscience.Neuron · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.