"White odor" - is an analogue of the olfactory white noise

Israeli psychologists found that all sufficiently complex mixtures of odorants cause the same subjective feeling of olfactory "white noise", even if they include no common components. In other words, a large number of odors, mixing, creating the effect of "white odor».

To create a mixture of smells, scientists used the 86 pure substances of known molecular formula. Based on them, the authors were combinations of pairs of different complexity such that a pair was not a general one substance. The resulting mixture showed volunteers who were asked to rate the similarity of complex odors.

It has been found that by increasing the number of components in a mixture of odorants her subjective odor becomes less discernible. For mixtures containing more than 20 components, more than half of the participants in the experiment had to "very similar" odor, despite the fact that between them there was no common components.

Most conventional fragrances such as rose fragrance or coffee, too, are integral, but are well distinguished from each other. The authors indicate that mixtures of such components firstly have similar chemical groups, and secondly, very different concentration and intensity of odor. Unlike natural, scientists used artificial mixture of both set of olfactory receptors activated by the same "force».

via factroom.ru