BYPASSING THE NOSE: THE QUEST TO DIGITIZE THE INTANGIBLE SENSE OF SMELL

Bypassing the Nose: The Quest to Digitize the Intangible Sense of Smell

From bionic noses to brain stimulation, the future of scent is no longer in your nostrils

By Dr. Shamil

Introduction

In my previous article, AI in Olfaction and the Digitization of Fragrances: A New Era in Perfumery, we explored how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the way fragrances are created, predicted, and personalized. But today, we go one step further. What if we could bypass the nose entirely?

In this article, we delve into the next frontier: bypassing traditional olfactory perception altogether through two groundbreaking avenues—neural prediction and bionic olfaction. Inspired by pioneering work such as that of Buck and Axel (1991), who identified odorant receptors, and Khan and Sobel (2004), who mapped how the brain processes smells, researchers are now working to digitize scent at the neurological level. The ultimate goal? To create and transmit digital smells—possibly even over long distances—without the need for the physical act of smelling.

The implications are staggering: virtual reality, medicine, marketing, therapy, and memory could all be transformed by the ability to encode scent as data, transmit it electronically, and deliver it directly to the brain.

Neural Prediction: Teaching AI to Smell for Us

One of the most promising breakthroughs in scent digitization is neural prediction—the ability to model how specific scent molecules affect the brain’s olfactory centers. By using AI to simulate these neurological responses, we could generate synthetic scent experiences without ever releasing a molecule into the air.

This approach opens the door to emotionally intelligent perfumes—ones that can be designed to calm anxiety, energize a room, or invoke nostalgia. It also lays the foundation for scent to be programmed as software—a sort of “neurological plug-in” you can download and experience.

Rather than detecting smell from the outside in, this technology could allow us to generate it from the inside out.

Digital Scent Creation: The Next Sensory Medium

Digital scent creation takes this a step further by leveraging machine learning to analyze molecular structures and predict how they will be perceived. This allows researchers to design entirely new smells—ones that might not even exist in nature.

Much like a composer creates music, a “digital perfumer” could design bespoke scent profiles tailored to your identity, emotions, or preferences. You wouldn’t just buy a fragrance—you’d subscribe to one, personalized and updated like a scent-based Spotify.

Direct Brain Stimulation: A Scent Without Smelling

Still in its early stages, direct brain stimulation is perhaps the most radical idea of all. It proposes skipping the nose entirely and sending olfactory information straight to the brain’s smell-processing regions via implanted or wearable electrodes.

Imagine a system where:

• An external odor sensor—perhaps embedded in glasses or a bracelet—detects ambient smells or triggers preset scent profiles.

• A microprocessor chip encodes this information into a digital signal.

• That signal is delivered via neural implants or wearable brain-interface devices that stimulate the olfactory cortex directly.

This is the premise of the bionic nose—a device that doesn’t just mimic smell, but digitally recreates it inside the brain. With enough precision, each scent could be reduced to a unique “digital fingerprint,” allowing for standardized transmission, sharing, and playback—just like an MP3 file for your nose.

Two Paths to Digital Scent: Bionic Nose vs. Neural Prediction

There are essentially two competing (and potentially complementary) approaches to digitizing scent:

1. The Bionic Nose

This method bypasses the nose and replicates the mechanical process of smell—detecting airborne chemicals and converting them into digital signals. It’s hardware-based and focused on mimicking natural olfaction at the input level. This is generally considered the more feasible short-term path because it follows the architecture of the human body.

2. Neural Prediction and Brain Activation

This method bypasses the nose entirely including the act of smelling by predicting how a scent affects the brain, then recreating that neural activity using electrodes. It’s software-led and far more complex, requiring deep understanding of the brain’s olfactory coding. But it also offers more control, personalization, and potential for remote or programmable scent transmission.

While a bionic nose might be good at detecting and interpreting environmental scents, neural prediction offers the tantalizing promise of teleported scent—imagine receiving the scent of a pine forest while sitting in your city apartment, no air freshener required.

Applications of Digital Scent

The use cases for digitized smell are vast, cutting across industries:

• Fragrance development: Design and preview scents digitally before synthesizing them physically.

• Virtual and augmented reality: Make virtual experiences deeply immersive by layering in contextual smells.

• Personalized scent marketing: Deliver targeted olfactory ads based on mood, location, or past preferences.

• Healthcare and therapy: Aid patients with anosmia (loss of smell), use scent-triggered stimulation for memory disorders, or deploy scents to manage anxiety and pain.

• Remote communication: Transmit scent digitally to enhance video calls, storytelling, or social media interactions.

Ethical and Technical Challenges

As we digitize smell, we must grapple with difficult questions:

• Complexity of Olfaction: Smell is the most emotionally linked of all senses—tied to memory, identity, and mood. Can algorithms truly replicate that depth?

• Neural Privacy: What happens when scent becomes a brain-level input? Could it be manipulated, hacked, or used to influence mood covertly?

• Cost and Accessibility: Will this be an elite novelty or a widely democratized sensory tool?

• Accuracy and Safety: How precisely can we simulate natural smell—and what are the risks of stimulating the brain incorrectly?

Digitizing scent is not just a technical challenge—it’s an ethical frontier.

Conclusion: Smell as Data, Emotion as Code

What once seemed like science fiction—transmitting scents across the globe, encoding them as digital files, and playing them back in the brain—is now inching toward reality. Artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and biotechnology are converging to transform smell from a passive human experience into an active, programmable one.

This isn’t just a new phase in perfumery. It’s the birth of a new sensory medium.

In the future, you may not just wear a fragrance—you may stream it. You may not just recall a memory—you may trigger it with a digital whiff. Fragrance may no longer be bottled but coded, embedded in apps, delivered in therapy, or sold as scent NFTs.

While challenges remain, the scent of the future is not in your nose—it’s in your neurons.

As we digitize scent and bring it into the realm of code, we must also consider what happens next. Could digital scents be used to revive memories, manipulate emotions, or even alter decisions? In a forthcoming article, we’ll explore the ethical, psychological, and cultural implications of a world where scent is no longer natural—but programmable, streamable, and potentially, transformative—even manipulative. 

References

• Buck, L., & Axel, R. (1991). A novel multigene family may encode odorant receptors: A molecular basis for odor recognition. Cell, 65(1), 175–187.

• Khan, R. M., & Sobel, N. (2004). Neural processing at the speed of smell. Neuron, 44(2), 231–234.

Dong, Q. et al. (2013). A novel bioelectronic nose based on brain–machine interface using implanted electrode recording in vivo in olfactory bulb. Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 49, 263–269.

Dong, Q. et al. (2025). Bioelectronic Nose for Ultratrace Odor Detection via Brain‑Computer Interface with Olfactory Bulb Electrode Arrays. Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 285, 117585.

Lipp, C. (2024). Devices for the electrical stimulation of the olfactory system. Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical.

Li, M. et al. (2019). Odor recognition with a spiking neural network from olfactory bulb spike trains. Sensors, 19(5), 993.

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