“I don’t know if it’s lack of experience and us just not being deliberate about it, versus there’s a fundamental brain limitation. Could be either, but we don’t know.” ~ Venkatesh Murthy

Lean into the language of smell with me: we sniff things out, we follow a scent. We’re nosey!

Is this not curiosity, enacted? Embodied!?

So what do we know about our sense of smell, and might studying it offer insights into the way our brains explore, learn and remember?

Venkatesh Murthy’s research focuses on understanding the neural and algorithmic basis of sensory-guided behaviors in animals. We have fun considering the many facets of smell, the merits of mice, the mysteries of memory, and two pungent truths: the perfume industry is huge and, ultimately, what matters most is survival.

At the end of the day, what good is cognition if your breathing and your temperature regulation and your hunger satiation — all of that is messed up. That is core. I think we tend to forget that, in the end, the body needs to be alive.

Listen to Ep. 291: Making Sense: Curiosity & Smell, with Venkatesh Murthy

Venkatesh Murthy is Raymond Leo Erikson Life Sciences Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Paul J. Finnegan Family Director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. Check out the Murthy Lab, his research with printed scent trails, and a fascinating interview with one of those esteemed colleagues Venki mentions.

Jason Logan’s smell map of New York City is a gem. What smells would you map?

Follow the scent: here are the episodes that might have inspired this one: How to be Color Wizard, with Jason Logan; A Mile in Their Shoes: A River Runs through Us; and Animal Curiosity at the National Zoo.

And, behold, an olfactory search algorithm from Dr. Murthy. It took all I had in me to not nerd out over this in our interview. Here it is: a mathematical formula for at least some forms of curiosity!

“At any given instant during olfactory search, the agent will have an estimate or “belief” b about the location of the odor source, which we will refer to as x. After the agent makes an observation o (some function of detecting odor and any other relevant sensory stimuli), it will take an action a and update its belief about the source location as:

b(x) = P(x | o,a,b_old)

My plain language version: our idea of a thing is the result of our old ideas about it, combined with our observations and actions, to generate our new idea about it. Curiosity, expressed as an ever-refining expression of belief. Gotta love it.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “A Palace of Cedars” by Pine Barrens, via Blue Dot Sessions.

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