Transcriber: Taiho Huang Reviewer: Capa Girl
(Indonesian) Konyune onorange-tanka.
(Indonesian) Konyune onorange-tanka?
Doesn't mean much to you.
It's a greeting word that the Ongees in the Andaman Islands use
when they meet each other.
And it means, “How is your nose?”
The Ongees, or the Capseekies, or the Serra Nuduts, like many other cultures
that we are not very familiar of
depend their life on the sense of smell.
It is so important that they greet each other
with a greeting like this,
instead of saying a short "hi" or "hello", like we do.
The replies to this greet is also connected to the sense of smell,
and if they say, like, "My smell is heavy”
or "I am smelling light" that means something
how an Ongee is feeling on that day.
Well, I know the theme of this TEDx talks is “I am”,
but if you will excuse me, I'll take it to a plural form,
and use “We are” for the beginning.
Yes, as you can guess from my opening lines
we are smelling beings
and we are smelly as well.
Our sense of smell is one of the senses
that we communicate with the outer world,
and I can say that it has a primary importance,
though we tend to not give importance to it.
We underestimate it.
The smelly impulses from odoriferous substances
are processed in the limbic system of our brains,
which is also the processing center for emotions and memory.
Therefore, we can say that
every time we smell something new for the first time,
we create a virtual memory card,
and place it in our memory databank.
And on that card, we take the note
of the emotional expression of this first encounter.
Later in our lives, when we smell the same substance again,
we call that card back and read and mimic the emotion
that we have felt in the first impression.
Please note that our sense of smell is one of the first senses
developed in the human being.
We start using it while we are taking our time in the placenta liquid,
in other words, when we are still “one” with our mothers.
Having said this, we are all sharing one thing in common.
The first data of our memory databank
is the smell of our mothers.
This is the reason why a newborn relaxes,
and pacifies when the smell of the mother can be felt.
So you can, you know, in the hospitals or in the care-houses
give the crying newborn
a blanket with the mother's odor attached on,
and you can see how the emotional expression of the baby changes,
or better, you can just let the mama hug the baby,
and you can see the differences in the behavior.
If we take this to a higher level,
we can also say that the sense of smell is a vital tool
for the humankind to survive and exist till today.
Think of our great great great ancestors,
I mean like, great great grandma, or great grandpas.
There were no supermarkets, there were no processed foods,
there were no labels with the last expiry dates written on.
So what enabled the great great grandma
to avoid harmful food and pick the nutritious ones
was the sense of smell.
We are not very aware of it, well we have two holes in our noses, you know?
Don't check it. (Laughter)
This is because we have to locate where the smell of the edible is coming from,
or in some circumstances,
from which direction the danger is coming.
It is true that we were hunters once,
but we were also the hunted ones.
And we looked for food,
but we were also food for other living creatures,
and we had to avoid it.
Talking about food, I think we are using the word “taste”
in a wrong manner today,
because actually taste is just the sense of taste alone,
which consists of a handful of identities:
sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami.
What is important for the human
is the total flavor perception,
and taste is just a small part of it.
If we don't get the smell of what we eat,
we get no flavor at all.
Now, you have the small boxes from your bags?
Let's make a small experiment.
You have them at hand? Please open them and take the jelly bean in your hands.
Now, please close your noses with two fingers,
but close it strongly so no air passes through.
You can hear from my voice.
OK? You can breathe from your mouth during this short period of time.
And put that small bean in your mouth
and chew it once or twice.
You're getting some sweet taste, huh?
Now you are experiencing your sense of taste
at the moment, but not the full flavor perception.
Now, please open your noses and inhale deeply.
You can smell the fresh peach, huh? Fresh peaches burst in your nose.
By opening your noses you let the air flow, carry odor molecules
to the receptors in the inner upper part of your noses
and send signals to your brain to be processed.
Now, you can say that what you are eating
is not only sweet, but a sweet peach flavored jelly bean.
What now you are experiencing is the full flavor perception.
You also can understand that without the sense of smell,
the taste alone does not allow you
to identify what you're eating.
And also, you don't get any pleasure from it.
Take a look at your personal history, and remember when you had a flu,
and your nose was blocked, and no air was passing through,
and what you ate really didn't mean much to you
because it was just a taste of smell,
and it was a small part of a greater sum.
So we say that 80% of the total flavor perception
is actually the sense of smell.
A small hint to you: the other element of the total flavor perception
is the texture of what you eat,
the temperature of what you eat
and sometimes, mostly on the professional level,
the visual image, including the color of the food
that you are eating.
Biologically, our survival as a species
depend on a triple core:
food, shelter and reproduction.
Everything else is a social sphere we build around this core.
So, having made this small experiment,
we saw that, most importantly, identifying the food,
therefore feed ourselves in a less harmful way,
and keep surviving is possible
only when the sense of smell is on the menu.
And now we go for another element of this triple core
which is reproduction.
Reproduction is sex as you know,
but no, we won't be making an experiment on this.
Not here, not today.
You know fingerprints are unique to each and everyone of us.
And similar to the fingerprints, we all have a unique body odor.
No one's is like the other, except for the identical twins.
It is something like your "bio-identity card", I can call it.
And what does our unique body odor depend on?
It depends on a group of genes
that regulate your immune system.
It's called the MHC, Major Histocompatibility Complex.
And to have a biologically healthy offspring,
our great great grandma had to find and copulate with a gentleman
whose immune system was different than hers.
This enabled two different immune systems
to combine and give a way to a baby
who carries the advantages of both, in terms of immunity of course.
Otherwise, the unfortunate results
of close relative marriages were inevitable,
and the human race could not have survived this long.
You can’t, by the way, read the MHC
or the codes of the immune system from your partner’s face.
The great great grandma couldn't read also.
She was ignorant as you know, she didn’t know how to read or write
even if it was possible to read the codes from the face.
And don't forget that we are talking about a few million years ago,
So the only expression of this genotype –
the immune system
or the phenotype of this genotype was the body odor.
In other words, the only indicator
about a correct biological mating partner
was available through the body odor
and the only way to detect this was to use
abilities of the sense of smell.
Let me remind you that this was a few million years ago,
and the social shell we build around the bio-core
was still under construction.
There were no wealth, no educated ones,
no significant social status for attraction,
or no settled farming,
no produced smells that we call fragrances,
no soaps, no bath gels, no shampoos,
no industry and of course, no pollution.
So if we speak of today, we have very little chance
to smell the basal body odor of our partners.
Maybe only in the intimate time we spend with them,
we might get some slight odoriferous signals
but never at a conscious level.
So let's make a cross check to this body odor and mating relation,
verbally of course.
We may look at the time when our bodies start to emit a characteristic odor.
You know babies and children smell different
than the adolescents and the grown-ups.
The sweat producing glands start functioning
at the same time when the body hair starts to flourish,
especially at the armpits and the genitals.
When sweat meets the bacteria sitting on the hair,
they get into a reaction
which produces what we call the smell of sweat,
or in short, stink.
This new body odor is actually the signal
of the start of the sexual productivity,
which carries messages of our immune system embedded in.
I repeat again, in short:
The time or age when a child turns into an adolescent,
is also the time when the body starts
to produce specific odors,
which are simply biological mating signals.
After making this small cross check, let me take it all from the start once more:
For the human race to survive
and walk through the passages of time,
it had to be able to feed itself and produce healthy offspring,
so the chain would go on.
These two main core functions are available only through our sense of smell,
and this also means that our underestimated sense of smell,
from an evolutionary point of view,
is one of the most vital senses.
For this reason, nothing is left to chance,
and we cannot command on the way our sense of smell functions.
If I don’t want to see you, I can close my eyes.
And you don’t want to hear my speech, you can close your ears.
But if we do not want to smell, we cannot close our noses,
because if we close our noses we cannot breathe,
and we know that breathing is something
we essentially need in order to go on living.
So for this reason, we breathe around 20,000 times a day,
and this number also gives us
how many times we smell in each passing day of our lives.
Well, I know I cheated a bit about talking about
what we are, instead of what I am,
but I believe these small passages
of how our great grandmas or great granddads survived,
also say something about who I am,
who you are,
how we kept on surviving for a few million years,
and how we can now enjoy this inspiring series of TEDx talks.
I wish you all to keep your noses open,
and in the meanwhile thank you for your patience
and wish you all fragrant days.
Thank you for being here.
(Applause)