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On the dimensionality of odor space
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 tec...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
2015
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4491593/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26151672 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.07865 |
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author | Meister, Markus |
author_facet | Meister, Markus |
author_sort | Meister, Markus |
collection | PubMed |
description | 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. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.07865.001 |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4491593 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-44915932015-07-08 On the dimensionality of odor space Meister, Markus eLife Computational and Systems Biology 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. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.07865.001 eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2015-07-07 /pmc/articles/PMC4491593/ /pubmed/26151672 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.07865 Text en © 2015, Meister http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Computational and Systems Biology Meister, Markus On the dimensionality of odor space |
title | On the dimensionality of odor space |
title_full | On the dimensionality of odor space |
title_fullStr | On the dimensionality of odor space |
title_full_unstemmed | On the dimensionality of odor space |
title_short | On the dimensionality of odor space |
title_sort | on the dimensionality of odor space |
topic | Computational and Systems Biology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4491593/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26151672 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.07865 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT meistermarkus onthedimensionalityofodorspace |