Sunday School: Olfaction

Pop quiz.  Why is it not good to drink beer "ice cold?"  There's really no way for you to answer that, so I'll just tell you.  The capacity of a liquid to hold carbonation increases as its temperature drops.  So when you chill a beer, you reduce the amount of gas available for olfaction.  What's olfaction?  Well the latin verbs for "to emit a smell" and "to make" come together to refer to our sense of smell.  That makes perfect sense.  Nothing backward about it, right?  As we all know, olfaction is a large part of taste.  How much?  Let's ask our friends on the web!

Not helpful...

Man, nothing good comes from the internet.  (Except for meeeeeee!)  Okay, okay, seriously this time.  It appears to make up somewhere between 70-80% of taste... or more.  This sense is really important for enjoying your beers to their fullest, but how does it work?  Being the most primitive sense, the most straightforward answer is we don't know.  "Primitive" in biology means "old" and the inevitable product of time and evolution is seamless complexity.  There's just so much to learn about it that researchers haven't gotten it all down.  What we do know is there are receptors for specific chemicals sticking out of the roof of our superior nasal concha, which is where air goes when you take a whiff.  These receptors are the only part of you brain that is exposed to the outside world in some way, so they're coated in a mucus rich with antibodies to protect against infections.  There are ten thousand different receptors, each responding to one and only one chemical.  Pretty simple except for the fact that we are capable of detecting at least ten million scents.  We don't know how this happens.  It could be accomplished by multiple receptors combining to trigger single smells, but there's dispute over that too.  Remember how I told you your brain reads chemicals to distinguish smells?  Well, we're not exactly positive on that either.  Some have theorized that what our brains are actually measuring is the frequency of vibrations in a molecule.  This theory is supported by research showing we can distinguish between identical chemicals at different energy levels.  Maybe we smell by listening.  No one really knows.

I guess I picked a bad topic for this week's Sunday School.  "This is how it works, we don't know how it works."  Oh well, it works, so go use it on some beer!