Re:Thinking with Adam GrantWhy your nose and sense of smell is secretly controlling your life | ReThinking with Adam Grant
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Smell and taste genetics shape health, emotion, relationships, and perception
- Super tasting is largely genetic, driven by taste-bud density and receptor variants, and often heightens bitterness and intensity (e.g., coffee, alcohol, leafy greens).
- Taste/smell sensitivity meaningfully influences behavior and health risks, from lower likelihood of heavy smoking/drinking to dietary avoidance that can raise risks like higher colon cancer rates in super tasters.
- Smell perception depends on both receptor biology (e.g., sensitivity to trimethylamine in “fishy” odors) and context, where visual cues and meaning can flip liking/disliking for the exact same scent.
- People systematically undervalue smell—even after COVID-related anosmia—despite evidence that smell loss can profoundly damage emotion, cognition, social connection, and sense of self.
- Human odor can carry diagnostic signals (e.g., infections, diabetes breath, Parkinson’s-related changes), and attentiveness to baseline smells enables detection of “something different.”
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasSuper tasting is a genetic intensity profile, not a preference choice.
Herz frames super tasting as largely determined by inherited alleles that influence taste-bud density and bitter sensitivity, which can make common items (coffee, alcohol, dark chocolate, greens) feel painfully bitter or “burning.”
Olfactory receptor differences can make the same food smell wildly different to different people.
Sensitivity often reflects receptor “copy number” and variants; heightened tuning to compounds like trimethylamine can make fish smell overpowering and therefore unpleasant to some, while others find it tolerable.
Smell and taste can diverge; “smells bad, tastes good” is real.
Herz explains that chewing releases additional volatiles (retronasal olfaction), changing the aroma profile relative to sniffing—helping explain items like stinky tofu or pungent cheeses that can taste appealing.
Context can flip perception—even with the identical scent or food.
Because smells are invisible, the brain leans on visual/auditory cues to assign meaning; Herz describes experiments where the same odor was liked in one framing and disliked in another, with participants doubting it was the same stimulus.
Taste sensitivity can shape health and addiction risk in opposite directions.
Greater intensity can raise the “barrier to entry” for heavy smoking/drinking (burn and bitterness), yet avoidance of bitter, antioxidant-rich vegetables may push some super tasters toward less protective diets and higher risk markers (e.g., colon cancer) unless they intentionally substitute healthier options.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesStill, 25% of college students would rather lose their sense of smell than their cellphone. 50% actually would rather lose their sense of smell than their hair. Okay, so that so hair ended up being, like, super important. I'm like, hair? I mean, yes, I like my hair, too, but it's not doing anything.
— Rachel Herz
Well, in all honesty, this may sound extreme to you, but I think that they should get, um, you know, between 90 and 100% of their net worth, because what people don't understand, their entire life was turned upside down in tremendously devastating ways.
— Rachel Herz
It's actually because the part of the brain that is processing our conscious perception of scent is the same part of the brain that is processing emotion and emotional learning and memory.
— Rachel Herz
You don't potentially realize it, but even being able to smell yourself, that's kind of like who you are. And if you don't have that, you kind of, like, lose yourself.
— Rachel Herz
The whole is not the same as the sum of the parts when it comes to smell, so you can never be sure exactly what you're getting into.
— Rachel Herz
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
