3.

3 Interview with Per Møller part 1

[MUSIC] My name is Per Moller. I work at the University of Copenhagen, where

I study the senses. So we try to understand how the senses work. And that has
to do with what goes on in, in, in the brain. So, it is psychology and since it
since it is psychology of the senses, you could refer to it as sensory
psychology. The borderline between what is physiology and psychology is not
clear. But one thing I think I would like to say, is that it is absolutely
meaningless to do physiological studies without knowing about the
psychological effects of, in our case olfactory stimulation. So, you need to
know the function of the brain, what it can do before you study how it does it,
right? So, it is psychology or psychophysics first that establishes functional
relationships. And then, if you're interested in people or humans, you can
study the human brain's how the human brain actually solve these problems.
So, sensory psychology, sensory physiology, it all has to do with
understanding how the senses work. In this case today we are mainly talking
about olfaction, the sense of smell. And the sense of smell is actually
interesting in many ways. Not only is it of course phenomenologically different
from the other senses, right. You know, it it is a different experience to smell a
thing than to see it. Another thing is that it seems to serve different purposes,
which is not surprising either. And, and these different purposes are reflected
in the way in the architecture of the system. One thing is that, that, that all
senses except the sense of smell are contra-laterally organized which means
that what you. For example in vision, what you, what is in your left visual field
is projected to your, to the right side of your brain. In olfaction, it is different. It
is ipsi-lateral, so to speak. And that leads to different implications, that maybe I
should not talk about now, but just let you know that it is differently organized.
What is more important, I think, is that olfactory, that is to say smell stimuli
reach emotional parts of the brain much faster than, than the other senses do.
So, therefore the sense of smell is a highly emotional sense. It also has a
completely different memory system attached to it. Together with some
colleagues, we have suggested a theory. That, that, that sort of try to explain
what olfactory memory is good for in connection to conscious perception of
smell. And, and the foundation of, of, of that way of thinking consists in, in, in
realizing that the sense of smell is a warning system. Most often when we are
in environments that are known to us, we don't notice smells. But if, if, if we
encounter a smell that is out of order, we immediately raise a flag and. Oh, I
can put it differently that very rarely, the sense of the smell is in the center of
our attention. We do not attend to it unless unless it is out of place. So it is a
warning system much more than a system to recognize things. And, and it
makes sense also then to suggest that sensing olfactory stimuli are important
for our sort of well-being and feeling at home. It provides some sort of safety.
And, and unless that safety is broken we don't notice smells. But it is important
that, that if things are misplaced or out of order, that immediately we can react
to it. And that makes sense, therefore, to have a very direct contact between
the nodes and emotional parts of the brain. The sense of smell is highly
emotional. And memory memories can be brought back from years, you know,
20 years ago, 30 years ago. And there is a phenomenon called Proustian
Memory. Which could be you open an old book and suddenly you are brought
back to your grandmother's house, or maybe the attic or something. and, and
that is an indication that you might say that smell is also a situational
sensation. That, that you store other types of events that you have
encountered together with the sense of smell. And if you encounter a particular
smell again, it will act as a key that opens up all these other memories that you
would otherwise never have come about. If I peel an orange and, and, and have
you smell it, you will say, this is a citrus fruit of a kind. You might not be able to
tell whether it is an orange or a mandarin or maybe even a lemon. But you can
get the category right. You cannot have a, an orange smell like coffee, for
example, or petrol, or something like that. Most immediate effect of a smell
stimulus we are, we, we can agree about. But this is not to say that you cannot,
in a sense, manipulate it, or be influenced by top down effects. Like if I have
you believe that a certain smell is of cheddar cheese, you will probably agree
with me. But if I instead had suggested to you that it was not the smell of
cheddar cheese, but rather your [SOUND] armpit, you would also agree. And,
and, and this example of cheddar cheese and, and the armpit smell has
actually, that experiment has been done ten years ago or there about. And it
was very interesting to see that the very same chemical, you know under these
different disguises, under these different stories gave rise to very different
activity patterns in the brain. Which is an indication that, that if you will, the
mind, what you are brought to believe, will influence what you actually
perceive. But, I, I would still suggest that this is a second order effect
compared to what I talked about before with the orange and coffee, for
example. Nobody, I think, can even though they might be very persuasive have
me perceive coffee as orange. But I could perceive an orange as a lemon, for
example, right. When we study the sense of smell or any other sense for that
matter we try [LAUGH] we try to, to sort of find ecologically important
problems. And I say this because quite a lot of brain science or sensory phys
psychology and physiology only lives in the lab. These are lab effects, and
they, they, they are not sort of, of ecological validity. So when we have
identified a problem that we find ecologically important. We first characterize it
by means of psychology or you might say psycho-physical experiments.
Thereby establishing the limits of a certain ability. Then when we have
characterized that, and that might take many, many years, and many, many
labs to do that. We also do electrophysiological studies, or brain imaging
studies also, you know. You can, you can study the brain in different ways. But
here in, in our lab we, we do electrophysiology or EEG to be more precise,
electroencephalography. And, and that is a method by means of which you,
you can, you, you, you record electrical signals on, on, on the scalp. And, and,
and that information contained in these electrical signals provoked by smelling
a thing. By means of mathematical al, algorithms, we can, we can sort of
calculate when and where there was activity in, in the brain. So that is
electrophysiology, understanding how the actual living brain does it. But it is
very different from a functional characterization. It, it might be that different
animals can, can do the same task. But how the different brains of different
animals do it might be very different. Because the task that they need or the,
the problem they need to solve play different roles for, for in the ecological
niche the animal finds itself in. So therefore, it might be much faster in one
animal than in another, because it is important for survival of that particular
animal. So and, and that's why you know, when science is best, you know? It, it
starts with, with, with problems in the real world of ecological importance to a
particular animal or human. It's transferred into psychophysics, and eventually
implementation in, in a particular nervous system by means of neural imaging
or electrophysiology. So an example, this is from vision rather than olfaction,
an example of, of, of how, you know, a problem is taken from you might say
ecology from an ecologically important problem, into psychophysics, into
physiology, has to do with locomotion. Locomotion means how can I walk
without bumping my head into doors. And that is to a very large extent based
on information about the so-called optic flow field, it's about motion detection,
visual motion detection. And this is important for birds, you know, who prey.
They sit up there and then they detect fish and then they go [SOUND]. They,
they need to know exactly when to spread out the wings, not to smash
themselves on the surface. And people need not to bump into doors. So, you
know, that is an ecologically important problem, locomotion or movement. And
as it turns out, from, from psychophysical experiments, the so-called optic flow
field that you might hear about in the vision part of, of your cause. Contains
enough information to allow people to avoid bumping those and huh, and birds
catching fish. And after the characterization psychophysically of these abilities
in people, in birds and all sorts of other animals. It has been studied by means
of, of neuroimaging and electrophysiology. And a certain part of, of, of the
visual system called area five or in America MT and MST. Has then been
identified and, and, and as the place in the brain where these computations, as
they are, take place. So, so better than example of an ecological important
problem via psychophysics vi, via psychophysical characterization has been
understood fairly well by means of electrophysiological and neuroimaging
methods. But an example of, of, you know, of, of a non-ecologically important
or problem would be to understand how I can stand on my toes. I certainly can
do that. But I'm not very good at it, ballet dancers are very good at it. And, and,
you could study that forever. But I would think that if you're interested in
standing and feet, you know, that we do not have feet in order to stand on our
toes. We have feet in order to walk. So, if you're interested in, in, in the feet, as
it were, I would suggest that it is of more ecological importance to understand
how we can walk, rather than how we can stand on our toes. There, there, there
is a sort of huge problem nowadays of over-eating and obesity. Right, I mean,
you know. In America it's two out of three who are overweight. They're not
obese but overweight. BMI larger than 25. And, then one might say, woo, this is
because our foods taste far too good and we can not limit intake of all these
nice things. This is why people eat too much and get fat, right? So that might
suggest if that theory is correct. That we can never have too much of a good
thing. I think that it is actually quite the opposite and we can definitely have too
much of a good thing. One example is if you eat a food you like a lot. If you eat
that to satiation so you say, now you're sort of getting satiated. You will
experience that it tastes less good than it did originally, that is called sensory
specific satiety. In other areas of pleasure like sexual pleasures, you know. It is
well known that there is a certain refractory period that, you know, you can go
about sexual activity for a while, it will end up in some orgasm, but then you
need to take a break before you can go on. And I think that it works in the same
way with olfactory pleasures. I, I do not think that, that, that our, that our
reward systems are sort of like an infinite basin that you can just keep filling.
The system reacts by itself by disliking what you have had a lot of. So, in for
reasons like that, I think that you can, you can indeed have too much of a good
thing. [MUSIC]