I Can ‘Smell’ Thoughts. You Can Too—and It’s Secretly Shaping Your Life.

6 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Researchers believe your sense of smell may be shaping how you interact with people on a daily basis, even altering your mood and perception. Some people’s smell is so powerful that they’re able to accurately identify patients with certain illnesses. One expert even honed her own sniffer after years of work, but the real question is whether you can tap into the sense, too. Staring into the crowded refrigerator, I pushed containers of cold leftovers to and fro, willing a more appetizing late-night snack to appear. Over the low electric hum, I heard footsteps approaching from the other side of the open door. Before I saw my father’s somber face, a smell, or something like it, caught my attention. Instantly, I recognized it—not from the actual odor, as I couldn’t put my finger on any one recognizable scent, but more so from a memory.This was the same way my dad smelled when he sat me and my sister down to tell us his own father had died. The same way he smelled when he picked me up early from high school to break the news about my maternal grandmother. The sadness in my dad’s voice came as no shock to me. Someone was dead. I knew with complete certainty that it was true. What I didn’t understand was how my nose knew it first.Olfaction—or your sense of smell—is an integral part of human perception. It alerts us to potentially dangerous environmental factors such as smoke or gas, supports other senses such as taste, and a good sense of smell is even linked to lower rates of cognitive decline. Thinking back to that day in the kitchen, I began to wonder whether my sense of smell had tuned me into a silent conversation everyone else was missing. As it turns out, a growing volume of research suggests that scent is quietly shaping how we perceive one another and, more broadly, our reality. For some, it even appears to be a superpower—allowing them to detect, just through their sense of smell, illnesses and undiagnosed diseases in others.One of these super smellers is a woman named Joy Milne, whose sense of smell is so acute that she’s able to detect when someone has tuberculosis, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, or Parkinson’s disease. Researchers put Milne’s nose to the test in a 2019 study published in ACS Central Science. The team asked two groups—one afflicted with Parkinson’s disease and the other healthy—to wear identical T-shirts overnight. When Milne smelled the shirts the next day, she was able to correctly sort all but one using just the power of her sniffer.Months later, the participant whose smell Milne had mistakenly slotted into the Parkinson’s category reported that he had been diagnosed with the disease. Milne’s nose had picked up on something long before doctors had diagnosed it.Pamela Dalton, PhD, MPH, studies the link between human olfaction and our cognitive and emotional processes at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, a scientific institute researching taste and smell. She says that, while not everyone has a nose attuned to medical maladies, the human olfactory system is constantly working overtime to decode and process the world in much more subtle ways.In fact, when I confessed the story about my father announcing that my great-uncle had died, Dalton wasn’t fazed.Dalton says humans communicate their feelings to each other through chemical molecules released in sweat, tears, or breath. These are called emotional chemical signals or emotional chemosignals. When the signals you give off reach another person, their olfactory system detects and interprets the chemicals. However, these aren’t processed the same way as regular smells.Most of the time, we connect our smells to other senses stored in our memories—how a food tastes, or how salty ocean air may feel calming. If you’re sitting in front of a slice of pizza, for example, those molecules bond with the sensory receptors in your nose, generating an electric current that ends up in two areas of your brain that are associated with your sense of smell—the olfactory bulb and olfactory cortex. As the current continues traveling through your brain, regions associated with memory and emotional regulation complete higher processing to link that signal with your previously stored understanding of the smell of pizza.With chemosignaling, on the other hand, a final association is never made. This is likely why the scent on my dad was familiar but not recognizable. In fact, to most people, chemosignals have no recognizable fragrance at all—so you won’t find a Yankee Candle that smells like sadness or an air freshener that reeks of stress.Instead, chemosignaling acts as an invisible guiding force. It’s something most of us do all the time. We unconsciously filter our perception of people and the world around us through these involuntary olfactory noticings. These signals cause us to constantly make little judgments about others, everything from what someone’s feeling to whether they’d be a good romantic partner.Dalton says the process of sending and receiving chemosignals usually bypasses conscious thought, meaning that we do it involuntarily and without noticing it. “It’s not like we’re [observing these chemical signals] and going, ‘Oh… she’s sad, I’m smelling her sad odor,’” Dalton says.However, that doesn’t mean that these signals go completely unnoticed. When your olfactory system senses someone else’s chemosignals, it can trigger changes in your perception, mood, or physical reaction, Dalton adds. In everyday terms, this may look like feeling inexplicably on edge around a friend who’s secretly stressed about a presentation they have at work the next day.Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a social scientist at Yale University and the director of the school’s Human Nature Lab, a project dedicated to understanding human interaction. Christakis affirms Dalton’s ideas about chemosignals, pointing to something much deeper in our species’ history. He explains that humans evolved in a “very logical way,” since we emit volatile chemicals into the air during our most vulnerable, fear-filled moments. These chemicals then change the behavior of those around us in ways that, theoretically, would enhance survival, he says.Christakis poses a few scenarios in which our ancestors might have felt danger, such as seeing a lion or a fire. “It’s not hard to imagine why, as a social animal, it would be useful to us to communicate to our brethren, ‘I'm afraid,’” he says. In terms of his analogy, if Christakis sees the lion and subconsciously emits these stress chemicals, you may realize he’s in trouble. “By signaling that I’m afraid, I might elicit from you some help,” he adds.In a more modern example, Christakis points to the intoxicating aroma of a newborn baby. He says that a key part of this smell is an organic compound called hexadecanal. Hexadecanal is completely odorless, meaning that, if you smelled a sample on its own, your brain wouldn’t immediately conjure images of babies.Despite this, a study published in Science Advances showed that participants unconsciously changed their behavior when asked to smell samples of hexadecanal. Specifically, men showed decreased aggression levels while women displayed the opposite. The theory, Christakis says, is that smelling a baby unconsciously causes people to become more nurturing and protective.Unlike the participants in the study, I was more conscious of the odor that clung to my dad all those years ago. Still, Dalton explains that what I “smelled” most likely wasn’t the scent of death itself. My olfactory system responded with amplified alertness because it registered the release of chemical signals, perhaps those associated with stress, sadness, or anxiety. Simply put, I didn’t smell the future—I recognized an olfactory pattern I had previously encountered.Dalton says it’s actually not that uncommon to become attuned to the chemical signals of people you spend a lot of time with. For instance, in a 2010 study published in Social Neuroscience, participants were able to detect heightened emotions in their romantic partners just by smelling their body odors. Additionally, people were more accurate when smelling their partner’s samples compared to those of strangers.In fact, Dalton herself has even developed a keen nose after years of working with thousands of fear and anxiety sweat samples—a skill that she showed off on an episode of MythBusters. She notes that stress sweat has “a very different quality” than exercise sweat, though she avoids describing the scent to keep herself open to variations, since not everyone’s signals smell the same.While Dalton acknowledges that there is still much to be learned in this field, she believes that these signals play a major role in shaping human interaction and perception. In short: It seems like sometimes you really should follow your nose.Special Digital IssuesOctober/November 2026Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.➡ America’s Radioactive Graveyard Is Quietly Leaking. Scientists Are Racing to Defuse the Threat.➡ It Flies Like a Plane, Lands Like a Helicopter—and Left 20 Service Members Dead. Why Does This Strange Aircraft Keep Crashing?➡ The Wild West’s Most Famous Missing Treasure May Be Hidden in Texas: Inside the Search for Sam Bass’s Gold➡ After 107 Years, Explorers Found History’s Most Legendary Shipwreck Beneath the Ice. 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This Weapon Can Save It.October/November 2022Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring:➡ Can America's M1 Abrams Still Compete With China's and Russia's Latest Battle Tanks?➡ Inside the Final Minutes of the Concorde Disaster—and How It Doomed Supersonic Travel for Decades➡ How the Massive Cargo Ship Felicity Ace Sank, Taking $400 Million Worth of Exotic Supercars With It➡ I Turned My Old Gas-Guzzler Into a Zippy EV for $15,000August/September 2022Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring: ➡ Cosmic Secrets of the 17 Most Powerful Mega-Telescopes on Earth—and Beyond➡ Can the Air Force's Secret, Hypersonic Jet Reclaim the Skies From Russia and China?➡ For 50 Years, the Zodiac Killer's 340 Cipher Stumped the FBI—Then Three Amateurs Cracked the Code➡ America's Most Fearsome Howitzer Has Entered the War in UkraineJune/July 2022DOWNLOAD HEREThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring:➡ Every Single Drone Fighting in the Skies Over Ukraine➡ How to Buy a New Car in 2022 Without Getting Fleeced➡ This Megastructure Could Keep Us Alive Forever➡ The Race to Revolutionize EV BatteriesStephanie Kasulka is an associate editor on the Hype Team, where she produces video, social media, and written content across the Enthusiast Group’s brands. She recently graduated from Lehigh University with a degree in journalism, where she learned she does her best work while sipping an iced tea. Outside the office, you’ll often find Stephanie thrifting or tackling a new arts and crafts project.