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St Hugh’s Fellow discusses the science behind the language of smell

St Hugh’s Tutorial Fellow in Experimental Psychology and Professor of Cognitive Science at Oxford University, Professor Asifa Majid, was recently interviewed by presenter, Michael Rosen on BBC Radio 4’s “Word of Mouth” about the words used to describe the qualities of smells in different languages. Her research has found that some do it much better than others.

During the interview, they discussed the language we use to describe smell and how it is very much about how we perceive the smell of an object. Professor Majid said, ‘ We have a much better sense of smell than perhaps people think. We can detect molecules at very low concentrations and we can also discriminate odours very easily – it is estimated that we can tell around trillion or more odours apart – this is more than colours (a few million).’

Professor Majid continued, ‘I can convey what a specific object smells like by referring to that object, for instance this smells like a rose or a banana, but we don’t seem to have dedicated vocabulary to convey distinct olfactory qualities in the way that we do for colours. If I say something is red or green, it’s picking out a quality – you don’t know anything about the object but you know what hue it is that I’m referring to.’

You can listen to the full interview on BBC Sounds here.