At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
How Smell and Taste Quietly Rewire Your Brain, Hormones, Behavior Daily
- Andrew Huberman explains how smell, taste, and pheromone‑like chemicals shape our brain states, hormones, and behaviors, often outside conscious awareness. He details the neurobiology of olfaction and taste, including how inhalation itself heightens alertness, learning, and memory. The episode outlines how chemical cues from food and other people influence attraction, appetite, metabolic health, and even reproductive biology. Huberman also offers practical tools to improve smell and taste sensitivity, support recovery after brain injury, and leverage these systems to enhance cognition and decision‑making around food and relationships.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasNasal inhalation and sniffing directly increase brain alertness and learning capacity.
Research from Noam Sobel and others shows that inhalation (especially through the nose) transiently raises cortical arousal and improves attention and memory, independent of what you’re smelling. Exhalation is associated with a slight dip in arousal. Restricting breathing to the nose during learning tasks improves performance versus mouth or mixed breathing. Practically, prioritizing nasal breathing—and taking a few deliberate nasal inhales before focused work—can measurably enhance focus and retention.
You can train and rapidly improve your sense of smell and taste with simple sniffing protocols.
Olfactory neurons are unusually plastic and replenish every 3–4 weeks, making the smell system highly trainable. Doing 10–15 deliberate nasal sniffs of ‘nothing’ and then smelling a food or object increases the richness and sensitivity of smell perception, likely by both waking up arousal systems and priming olfactory receptors. Repeating this regularly can long‑term enhance discrimination of odors and, via smell–taste coupling, make eating more satisfying while sharpening your palate.
Loss or change of smell is a meaningful signal of brain and nervous system health.
Olfactory neurons project through the cribriform plate and are often sheared off in concussions and other head trauma, making smell loss common after TBI. Recovery of smell tracks, in part, recovery of neural integrity and neurogenesis from the subventricular zone. Similarly, early smell deficits can correlate with neurodegenerative conditions and were a key early sign in COVID‑19. Structured olfactory training (frequent deliberate smelling, nasal breathing) and behaviors that support dopamine and blood flow can aid recovery of olfaction.
Taste is a safety and nutrient-detection system first, pleasure system second.
The five core tastes—sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami—and a likely sixth (fat) each serve specific survival functions: sweet signals rapid energy, salty signals electrolytes, bitter warns of poisons and connects directly to gag reflex circuits, sour warns of spoilage/fermentation, and umami flags amino acids/protein. These receptors are intermingled across the tongue (not in distinct “zones” as textbooks once claimed) and relay via the gustatory nerve to insular cortex, where we construct our taste perceptions.
Gut and brain circuitry can be hijacked by processed foods to drive overconsumption.
Neurons in the gut sense sugars, fats, and amino acids and send signals via the vagus nerve to release dopamine in the brain, independent of conscious taste. Food manufacturers exploit this by designing textures and ingredient combinations (e.g., specific sugar–fat–salt ratios, Maillard browning flavors) that strongly activate gut–brain reward circuits and oral texture pleasure, making it “impossible to eat just one” even when the food doesn’t taste particularly good. Recognizing this helps explain persistent cravings and can motivate shifting toward less engineered foods.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesInhaling itself wakes up the brain. It’s not about what you’re smelling, it’s the act of inhalation.
— Andrew Huberman
Just the tiniest bit of training and attention in the olfactory system can radically change your relationship to food.
— Andrew Huberman
Chemical sensing is among the most primitive senses we have, but it’s still controlling huge aspects of our biology today.
— Andrew Huberman
Processed foods may make you eat more of them not because they taste good, but because they feel good in your gut and drive dopamine.
— Andrew Huberman
You are actively seeking out and evaluating other people’s chemistry from the time you’re born until the time you die.
— Andrew Huberman
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