Smell of success for Weizmann autism test

AUTISTIC PEOPLE STRUGGLE in social situations because they cannot understand smell-cues that people send each other through body odour, according to new Israeli research.

Most people respond subconsciously to the smells of others, and when neuroscientist Noam Sobel asked people to interact with robots that were emitting the smell of human fear, almost everyone became uneasy.

But Dr Sobel reported that “individuals with autism actually trusted the fear-smelling robot more”.

He told the JC: “If we expose most people to the smell of fear it impacts the nervous system and people become stressed, while in people with autism it does the opposite.”

The robot test was part of a series of experiments that Dr Sobel conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science, near Tel Aviv.

“All mammals use the sense of smell to communicate social information, as anyone who has walked a dog knows,” he said.

“And there is growing indication that this is important to humans.”

The US military is well aware of the importance of smell signals. For the past three years, Dr Sobel has been working with them on a project to persuade people to respond well to robots.

“We have a US-army funded project to make robots more trustworthy to humans by having robots emit body odour using devices that make this happen,” he revealed, explaining that the smells in question are detected subconsciously.

“We can indeed influence people’s reactions to a robot by having them emitting an odour.”

When it comes to autistic people, it seems that they are able to smell and detect odours like others but they then interpret the subliminal signals very differently to others.”

The research has been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, where Dr Sobel and team explained that the smell of fear they used was sweat collected from people taking skydiving classes.

The control odour was sweat from the same people; only, this time, it had been collected when they were just exercising, without feeling fear.

Autistic and non-autistic people reacted to each smell in a different way.

Across the control group, smelling the fear-induced sweat generally produced measurable increases in the fear response, for example in skin conductivity, while the everyday sweat did not.

But, among the group’s autistic men, fear-induced sweat lowered their fear responses, while the odour of so-called “calm sweat” did the opposite and raised their measurable anxiety levels.

Dr Sobel said he hopes that his research will eventually lead to scholars having a better understanding of the causes of autism and being able to help people with the disorder.

He said: “If you eventually find the underlying cause of autism, you would be able to diagnose it much earlier and start treatment earlier. And perhaps, as we’ll understand the mechanisms of autism, [it will] lead to treatments I can’t yet imagine.”

Haifa-born and US-trained, Dr Sobel has been working for 25 years on understanding the importance Austistic people struggle to smell fear, research just published has revealed

of smell for humans. He has hit on some surprising theories, such as the idea that the main reason humans started shaking hands was to get a chance to smell their body odour, or their “social chemo-signals”.

The olfactory system is not just about smell, Dr Sobel stressed, but also plays a part in our most basic social interactions, emotions, and recollections.

We influence reactions through odour