Is it possible to transmit and receive smell?

I do think you could encode a smell into binary data.  However, using binary data to reproduce the smell would be worthy of a Nobel prize.  I mean being able to reproduce any smell without having to have samples of the item would be equivalent to Star Treks replicator.  If you look at what  a "smell" is, it is tiny particles of the items airborne.  This is equivalent to protein restructuring or replication.

So build a device with a library of smells.  Let the user pick an item and then produce the smell, start there.

One work around, equally revolutionary, would be to transmit the electrical signals directly to the brain without needing to reproduce the sample.  But that would probably violate E14s human experimentation clause.

Just my .025.

The only reason we do not transmit and receive smells electronically is that they are not that important to us. Ask yourself, how does a smell differ from a color. We transmit and receive colors everyday on our computers, scanners and printers. If smells were as important to our communications as colors are we could just as easily transmit them. When the dogs evolve there will be smell transmission.

John

Unfortunately colors, are just electromagnetic waves (specific frequencies of visible light).  These are transmitted in nature as the sun transmits color to us all day long.  Smells on the other hand have mass, they have organic matter, and are completely different.

Transmitting a smell would be equivalent to transmitting matter is what I am getting at.  If you can transmit a smell, you could transmit other material objects.

We have not yet been able to convert energy into matter directly. When that day comes, we live in a whole new world.

NOW, unless you can find a way to send electrical signals to the brain, then I think it could be done with that shortcut.  You wont need to create the matter, just reproduce the signal in the brain!

There are lots of things important to us that we cannot do.  For example, cure cancer.  While importance is necessary (necessity is the mother of all invention), that alone is not enough to solve problems.

I think JWT that you are wrong in this.  If olefaction is so unimportant, why is the olefactory bulb so large?  So, your model violates parsimony.  Audition and vision are channels which cultural-symbolic information enter the mind.  Smell is a direct input to the subconscious.  The subconscious mind directs behavior.  The conscious mind formulates excuses for behavior, for internal and external consumption.

With all that said I am NOT a nay sayer ever.   I am just trying to help you understand the scope of the problem.

I am no expert on smell either.  But I do know that smell is the material items touch the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemoreceptor

So for now, to smell something you need molecular samples of the item.

I think smell detects thing like MW and distribution of charge.  Hue does relate to electromagetic frequency, but color assignment is a cultural compact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect

If I have a color document that has information on it like a schematic I can scan it and email it to you and your printer can replicate it. We are not transporting the document like star trek we are analyzing it and turning it into a digital model, transmitting it, and then reassembling a facsimile using a printer. There is no reason that we could not sample an odor in the air with suitable sensors, digitize the data, send it to a suitable machine that could dispense aerosol of any number of chemicals into the air at the receiving end to replicate the odor. I do not see the difference between sending color information as opposed to olfactory information. The difference is only in the importance of the information to present day communications. The colors of the schematic are important to us. Whether the schematic smells like ink, or old wood, or my spilled Old Spice is irrelevant to most of our important technical and interpersonal communications. D_Hersey rightly points out the a lot of our brain mass is dedicated to smell. I do not know why this does't make smell more important in our lives but it probably goes back to evolutionary stages where it "was" more of a survival mechanism. This has evolved into a better discussion than I thought it would.

John

Right, we have a printer.  We would need a printer for smell, so if I wanted to send you the smell of lemon, your machine must reproduce the lemon molecules.

I suppose it could have numerous chemicals it could combine to make the smell.  But it would be very large and dangerous!

Hi!

Our sense of taste is not great in some ways. We think we're just evaluating what the tongue senses but part of 'taste' is the smell of something. We easily get confused when we have a cold.

And I can't tell the difference between what I think nail polish may taste like, and pear-flavoured jelly beans : ) If it wasn't green-coloured I would have no idea what it was, so looks play a part too, as does texture. Plus we have few ways to describe taste except with items, and items have a physical look. (Similarly I couldn't describe a pear smell without saying that it smelt like a pear, or a fruity smell, or a nail polish smell : ). The physical three items - pear, generic fruit, nail polish are completely different. I'd have to find a tangible item basically).

Basically in real terms when we say "taste", we don't just mean what the tongue is evaluating. We include the extra like smell and vision, so we say that a meal tasted delicious etc., we might say something different if we couldn't see it or if it wasn't juicy when it should be, etc.

So, probably smell can be confused too without visual prompts. It is maybe possibly that only a subset of smells are needed, and with the right prompts, we can be fooled into thinking it is something it isn't. In other words, if we need a device (can't think why though, but others may have needs for it) that conveys smell, then it could be restricted to a device with fewer chemicals, that needs to be used combined with vision perhaps!

However this does mean that the sensor device would also need to combine smell with (say) vision in order to transmit the correct data for the

smell generator..

An interesting thing about smell is that losing it is a harbinger of dementia.  Not all smells have conscious salience yet still effect mood.