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Published July 7, 2015 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

On the dimensionality of odor space

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.

Additional Information

© 2015, Meister. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. Received April 1, 2015. Accepted June 16, 2015. Published July 7, 2015. Author contributions: MM, Conception and design, Analysis and interpretation of data, Drafting or revising the article. Funding: No external funding was received for this work. Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Adam Shai for extended discussions. Supplementary file ·Source code 1. Annotated Igor (Wavemetrics) code. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.07865.008

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