Why Couples Hate to Talk About Money & How Scents and Smells Affect You

In the online shopping world, there is something called “cart abandonment discounts.” Listen as I explain what they are and how you can save money on some of the items you want to buy as long as you are not in a huge hurry to buy them. https://thekrazycouponlady.com/tips/store-hacks/amazon-cart-abandonment-discounts Money is often a difficult subject for couples to discuss. One of the big reasons is that those discussions often turn into fights. But what if you could turn those discussions into fun and enjoyable talks that resulted in a shared vision of a rich life together? And what if the fights over money stopped completely? Wouldn’t that be great? It can happen if you listen to my guest Rahmit Sethi. For several years he has been helping people look at their money differently. He had a huge bestselling book a few years ago called I Will Teach You To Be Rich (https://amzn.to/4h47FIm) and his latest book is called Money for Couples (https://amzn.to/4j3daJo). There are so many ways your sense of smell works to your benefit. For one thing, you are attracted to another person (or turned off by them) often because of how they smell, even if you are not conscious of it. Your sense of smell works in some interesting and mysterious ways. And here to explain the science behind all of it is Jonas Olofsson. He is a professor of psychology at Stockholm University, where he directs the Sensory Cognitive Interaction Lab and he is author of the book, The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell – and the Extraordinary Power of the Nose (https://amzn.to/3DSgNS8). Your bedroom is probably dark when you go to bed – at least mostly dark. But is it completely dark? If it’s not, there is something you need to understand, and we learned about it from hamsters. https://sciencemadefun.net/blog/this-color-night-light-is-best-for-sleep-the-color-will-surprise-you/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:28Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, a clever way to get discounts online for products you want to buy. Then, money and couples, and the best way to discuss the topic.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  I think the biggest mistake couples make with money is that they don't have a shared vision of a rich life. You can't live a rich life if you're spending the next 30 years fighting about celery at the grocery store.

• 1:55Mike Carruthers?

  Also, there's something going on in your bedroom while you're sleeping you need to pay attention to. And all the extraordinary ways your sense of smell affects you, including your love life.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Those people who lose their sense of smell often report that their love lives suffer, so they don't feel as connected to their partner. And oftentimes, they might not be aware that it's the sense of smell that brought about this close emotional tie between them.

• 2:23Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 2:27Mike Carruthers?

  I imagine most of us shop for clothes online, at least some of the time. And there's always that little mystery. Is what shows up at your door actually going to look like what you think you ordered? We've all had that experience. I know my wife has ordered dresses that look beautiful in the pictures, but when they arrived, eh, not so beautiful. Cheap-looking, disappointing. And that's one of the reasons we've become such big fans of Quince. When we order from Quince, we are confident we're going to get something really nice. The quality is consistently good, and the prices are surprisingly reasonable.

• 3:07Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:52Mike Carruthers?

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• 4:23Mike Carruthers?

  Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I imagine you do at least a little online shopping. Seems like everyone buys some stuff online. We certainly do in this house. We have something delivered at least several times a week. If you are an online shopper, there is something about online shopping you may not know about. It's called cart abandonment discounts. And basically, what that means is if you go shopping online and you get as far as putting something in your shopping cart but not buying it, you just leave it in the shopping cart, or maybe you put it in the shopping cart and then remove it. Well, the retailers can see all that activity, and they will sometimes, not always, but

• 5:07Mike Carruthers?

  sometimes, then offer you a further discount, hoping that what's going on there is that you're just on the fence about buying whatever it is that you put in the shopping cart, and maybe with a little incentive, meaning a better price, that may push you to make that purchase. According to the website crazycoupons.com, it was only recently, just a few months ago, that Amazon started doing this. Now, these discounts aren't always easy to spot. Sometimes a retailer will send you an email, or you might just see a lower price on the product page for that item. But in any event, if there's something you want to buy and you're in no big hurry, you

• 5:49Mike Carruthers?

  might try putting it in your shopping cart and see if a better price doesn't come along. And that is something you should know.

• 6:00Mike Carruthers?

  A topic on the minds of many people at the start of a new year is money. This year, this time, I'm really going to get my financial affairs in order. At least, that's what a lot of people hope for. But as we have discussed many times here with other guests, managing your money gets tricky, especially if you're part of a couple. Because couples often disagree on what to spend money on, how much to save, what's a priority. If you can relate to any of this, I want you to listen to this next conversation with Ramit Sethi. Ramit has a bestselling book that's been around for a while called, "I Will Teach You To Be Rich," and he has a brand-new book out that is already a big

• 6:44Mike Carruthers?

  bestseller called, "Money For Couples." Hi, Ramit. Welcome back to Something You Should Know.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me back.

• 6:52Mike Carruthers?

  So, let's start with this question. Why do you think that money is such a touchy subject for couples? Why do couples avoid it, or don't talk openly about it, that it's just something we'd really rather not discuss?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  The biggest reason is that we usually only talk about money when we fight. Think about it. It's someone is a spender, someone is a saver. You end up looking at the credit card bill, you go, "How could you spend that much?" And then, you go to sleep, paper over it, and wait for the next fight to happen six weeks later. And most couples do this for the next 40 years. There's gotta be a better way to talk about money that makes it positive and fun.

• 7:38Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, well, when you explain it that way, who wouldn't want to do that? Who wouldn't want to make the topic fun? Because it's a topic, whether you discuss it or not, it's there. It's there, and it's either gonna be trouble, or if there's a way to make it fun, then let's make it fun.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kinda crazy. I mean, think about the fact that most of us, we have this deep, invisible belief in America that money is unromantic. And the reason I got so interested in money and couples is that it is one of the last taboos. You know, many of us would rather talk about our sex lives than how much money we make, how we spend it, are we on track for retirement? And when you start to shine a light on these things, not just with one person's money, but a couple's money, you start to unravel a series of invisible expectations. I just find it incredibly juicy, and it's incredibly fun

• 8:35Speaker 01

  to watch couples finally develop a shared vision of a rich life.

• 8:41Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it does seem, and you know, I can speak from my own experience, but also just from talking to other people, that

• 8:49Mike Carruthers?

  A big part of the problem is because so much goes unsaid, undiscussed, assumptions are made, and I know what I think you should do, but I don't ever tell you, and that we just don't sit down and talk about it.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  It starts when we're dating. You know, many couples, when they're dating, they don't have serious conversations about money. In fact, there's only really three or four moments in a couple's entire life that they really talk about money. One of them is when they buy a house, another one, if they do, another one is if they have children. Skip over to about age 58, when they start to think about retirement, and then often it's death. I mean, that's it. Four times over the course of an entire lifetime that we talk about money. I don't like that. I think money is not about having the conversation.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  It's about having a series of regular, positive, proactive conversations. And there's no reason to apologize for it.

• 9:55Mike Carruthers?

  My sense is you don't want to talk about it because here's what's going to happen, or here's the fear of what might happen, is I'm going to want to do this, and you're going to want to not do that, and then we're going to argue about it because I want to spend money and you want to save money, or you want to spend it on this and I want to spend it on that, and then it turns into a fight, and we can just avoid that by staying quiet.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Bingo. You nailed it, Mike. I think the biggest mistake couples make with money is that they don't have a shared vision of a rich life. That's it. That's end all be all. You'll have one person who likes to travel more, the other doesn't. So they'll go the next 40 years fighting about taking a trip, or one person likes to buy Monster Energy drinks, and the other thinks it's ridiculous. They'll literally fight about it for 25 years. And I'll ask them, what is your rich life? And they look at me like I'm crazy. Rich life? We're just trying to pay our bills. I go, you can't live a rich life if you're spending the next 30 years fighting about celery at the grocery store.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  So, one of the best techniques you can use as a couple is to zoom up, put all the arguments aside about credit card debt, or traveling. And just say, what is our rich life? It might be, we want to travel twice a year. It might be, we want to send our kids to camp. It might be, I want to spend Saturdays just watching TV. That's okay. Start there. And as you start to change money from a negative thing into a positive conversation, one of possibility, suddenly you have a vision to work towards. And now you can say, does it make sense to buy that car? Or that house? Or should we eat out five times a month or 10? Now we have something that we are working towards.

• 11:48Mike Carruthers?

  But what happens to those arguments about the Monster Energy Drink? They're still there.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I like to be specific in all my books. I always give word for word scripts. I give the exact way to set your accounts up as a couple. And when you set your accounts up using my setup, each of you has your own separate account with no questions asked money. So whether it's a hundred bucks or 5,000 bucks a month, that's TBD based on your income. But you and your partner will each have your own money. If you want to spend it on Monster Energy Drinks, three times a day, you want to have a heart attack by the time you're 41, that's your prerogative. You've got the money. It's in your own account. And your partner will not ask you any questions because you are using the money from your individual account.

• 12:38Mike Carruthers?

  When you have your first conversation, how does, how do you prepare for that? How does it start? Because that's what keeps people from doing it, I think, is how, it's uncomfortable to imagine sitting down and having this discussion. So walk me through it.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  I call it your first positive conversation about money. And that's because whether you are dating or whether you've been married for 30 years, many couples have not actually talked about it in a way that feels good. And so your first positive conversation has four parts and it's very simple. The first is you introducing the concept. You might say something like, you know what? I realized that when we talk about money, it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel like we're connecting. And honestly, sometimes I think I get a little too negative.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  I would love to change that. What you're doing there is you're sharing some vulnerability. You're kind of opening up the conversation. Next, when we talk about money, right now I feel overwhelmed. I feel stressed. How about you? Notice that I'm admitting how I feel and then I'm tossing the ball to my partner because we want a dialogue. Next, I want to feel positive, in control. I want to feel connected. How about you? Get their thoughts. And then finally, when should we talk next? That's it. Notice I did not pull out a budget. I certainly didn't talk about credit card debt. It was just a recalibration. And at the end, you look at your partner, you give him a hug and a kiss and say, I love you.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 14:16Mike Carruthers?

  So on a practical level, like, how long is this conversation? Because I'm fearing that it's like hours and it...

• 14:23Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. So what, this conversation is no longer than 15 or so minutes. It's short. This is one of the key myths that we have with money is that we need to get everything out on the table in one conversation. It's like, who wants to do that? Think about when you're going on your first date. You don't need to tell your whole life story. You just need to see if you like them and if they like you. Same thing with money. In fact, I would suggest never using some of the following words in your early conversations. Budget, retirement, debt, you really need to, those kinds of things. We don't want any of that. We don't want negativity or restriction. We just want to start off with positivity.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  It's about recalibrating our relationship with money and really deep down with each other.

• 15:13Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about couples and how they handle money. My guest is Ramit Sethi, author of the book, Money for Couples. This episode is sponsored by Vinted. You know, I remember interviewing an organizing expert who offered this really clever trick for figuring out which clothes you should get rid of. You go to your closet and you look at the clothes hanging there. And chances are, the ones toward the middle are the clothes you wear most often. But the clothes pushed way over to the left or the right, some of those you probably haven't worn in years, and yet there they hang, taking up space. But here's the thing, you could turn those clothes into money. That's where Vinted comes in.

• 15:57Mike Carruthers?

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• 16:41Mike Carruthers?

  You keep every dollar you earn. That's Vinted, V-I-N-T-E-D. If you listen to something you should know regularly, you know we talk about sleep quite a bit here. And one of the things I've learned from those conversations is just how important a good night's sleep is. And I've always been someone who loves his sleep. So I was intrigued when I heard about Beam Dream. It's a delicious nighttime drink formulated to help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed. It contains ingredients like reishi, magnesium, L-theanine, epigenin, and melatonin. They have lots of great flavors.

• 17:24Mike Carruthers?

  I tried the cinnamon cocoa flavor, and I love the idea of having something warm and delicious as part winding down at night and it's less than 20 calories per serving. Dream has improved more than 30 million nights of sleep and they back it up with a 30 day money back guarantee. If you don't sleep better, you get your money back. And right now, there's a terrific offer. Go to shopbeam.com/ s y s k. Use code s y s k and get 50% off during Beam's cyber sale. Only available while flavors are in stock. With this incredible discount, that means you'll pay just 83 cents per night for the best sleep of your life.

• 18:09Mike Carruthers?

  So seriously, think about it. I mean, how much would you pay for a truly great night of sleep? Beam is just 83 cents per night. So go to shopbeam.com/ s y s k now. That's shopbeam.com/ s y s k. So, Ramit, it seems like, listening to you talk about this, that it really requires like a shift, like, rather than talking about money as a problem that needs to be solved, it's much more of a proactive activity to plan ahead.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  You can hear in my voice, I think money's fun. I think it's exciting. When a lot of people hear the word money, they think of a budget and decimal places. When I think of money, I see a family trip to Disneyland. I see Saturday with the kids. So we want to reframe what money is to us. And one of the things you can do is something I call the 10-year bucket list exercise. You both sit down, you go, hey, in our next 10 years, what would be an amazing set of things we could do to give us a rich, meaningful life? Write them down independently, then compare notes. Have some fun. Oh, my God, you want to go skydiving? I'll meet you on the ground with some champagne.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  But pick one that's exciting for both of you. And then decide when you want to do it, how much it's going to cost. And if it's eight years from now, it's going to be X dollars, you can start automatically saving for it. This is how you start to use money to live your rich life and get beyond just paying bills.

• 19:47Mike Carruthers?

  What about the issues? In fact, the one you just mentioned, skydiving. You want to go skydiving? Well, I don't want you to go skydiving. I don't want your parachute not to open and die. So now we're at odds about that. There are some things that you might want to do that's fine for you, but I don't want you to do that. I don't want us to do that because I don't.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  This is a great thing to bring up because a lot of couples don't agree on everything. And that is fine. As an example, my wife loves self-care. It's her money dial. A money dial is a thing you love to spend money on. I'm not really into it that much. My money dial is beautiful hotels. I love beautiful hotels. She doesn't really care about it. So you can have a very successful relationship with money, even if both of you don't want to spend money on exactly the same things. That's fine. What's important is you have a high level of a rich life vision. Like, how much do we want to save? What's important to us? Things like, where do we want to live?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  What kind of car do we want to drive? Those are important because those are big purchases. But when it comes to things like self-care, my wife, for example, would spend most of that money out of her own individual account. And for us, when we take trips, you can create a way of doing it. For example, we might have our joint account pay for most of our hotel. And then if I want to stay at an extra nice place, I might take some of my individual money and put it towards that. In other words, you can still have a very rich life, even if the two of you don't agree on everything.

• 21:30Mike Carruthers?

  Where do you find specifically? What are the things that the stumbling blocks here, the bumps in the road that couples run into?

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Mike, this is one of the crux, one of the most surprising things about my work over the last 20 years, is literally couples will spend their entire lives fighting about coffee. And when I point out that coffee has virtually no effect on their finances, they're just completely stunned. I want to give you a few statistics that are absolutely shocking. It's going to be hard to believe, but it's true. Number one, of all the couples I speak to, 50% of couples do not know their household income. Fifty, five zero, that's not a typo. Think about it. You're going 10, 15 years arguing about who spent too much at Target, but you don't even know your household income. Almost nobody knows what percentage

• 22:20Speaker 01

  they invest every month, their investment rate. That question alone is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, not the price of potatoes. 90% of couples who are in debt don't know how much debt they're in, and 100% of couples with credit card debt, 100, struggle to say no to their kids because it's the same principle that gets you into credit card debt that often prevents you from saying no to your kids. These are all way more important than how much you're spending on lattes, and that is what I want people to start to focus on. The important things, not just the urgent things.

• 22:57Mike Carruthers?

  You know, just this idea of talking about money, and what you're talking about is just a couple talking about their finances. But we have in our culture, this kind of, money's not something you talk about. You don't talk about money with anybody. That's not polite.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  The things we talk about are the things that we stick to. If, in your family, fitness is important, you talk about it all the time. If family's important, you talk about it all the time. But with money, we rarely do, especially with kids around. Many people, deep down, believe that money is bad and evil, and they should, quote, protect their kids from money. Wrong, wrong. We talk about money all the time. So, one way to do it is to set up a monthly money meeting. This is you and your partner. You have an agenda, and each of you contributes to it. You can rotate who runs the meeting. And in this meeting, you always start with a compliment, always. "Hey babe, I really love

• 24:00Speaker 01

  how every time we travel, you always find the best seats for us on the airplane. I know, I love knowing that I can trust you." Feels good. It totally recalibrates our relationship. You go over any key numbers. I have some very specific numbers that you track. Each of you owns a couple of those numbers. And then you talk about the future. What's coming up? What do we need to know? Is our dishwasher breaking? All that kind of stuff. Every single month you do this. It becomes something, not to avoid, but something that actually connects you two together.

• 24:34Mike Carruthers?

  So let's talk about credit card debt because that is a big elephant in the room that, you know, people make their minimum payments perhaps, and so the elephant is fed for the month, but it's still a big elephant in the room.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Like I said, most people in debt do not know how much debt they are even in. And in fact, people in credit card debt over time, they come to get used to it. It's like having a wound on your arm. At first, it's incredibly painful, and after a while, you forget that it's even painful. It's just you learn to live with it. To me, there are some things in a relationship that are massive red flags. You should stop everything and solve this right away because it is an emergency. Credit card debt is one of those things. You can solve credit card debt. You can definitely pay it off, and many people can pay off their credit card debt way faster than they ever thought, way faster. Just as one example, if you have a lot of credit card debt, paying even an extra $100

• 25:34Speaker 01

  a month can shave that payment down by years. The math is very counterintuitive. So the first thing to do is acknowledge it. Hey, we have credit card debt. This is a problem, but we're going to get through it. The second is to get the numbers. You gotta know your numbers, how much you have, what's the interest rate, what is the debt payoff date. This is scary. It's kind of like people who go to the doctor for the first time in 20 years. They're afraid of what they might hear, but you gotta do it, shine a light on it. And then three, you make a debt payoff plan. You do this together. You avoid gimmicks. Lots of people, when it comes to paying off debt, they will do everything except setting up automatic payments to pay off their credit card.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  They do balance transfers, they do this, they do that. Okay, you can try it if you want, but really, it's about paying off your debt and doing it together. When you do this, and when you use something like my conscious spending plan, it becomes very obvious how much you have, how much you need to pay off, and when you're going to be free. And free is an amazing feeling.

• 26:39Mike Carruthers?

  But you also have to change your behavior because if you keep spending money and putting it on your credit card, you'll never get there.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Exactly right. And that's why with couples, you can't just do it alone. It would be like one person going on a massive fitness transformation and the other is still eating pizza and chicken wings. It just doesn't work. You've got to do it together. So that's why, number one, you gotta use the scripts to connect. The two of you come together and go, hey, what is our rich life? It's doing this, it's seeing our grandparents, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, cool. Well, in order to do that, right now, we're paying X hundred dollars a month towards credit cards. We can't afford that stuff right now. Let's make a plan. Most of us were very passive with our money. But when you understand money, you realize, oh, my God, I can actually affect a lot of this myself.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  I can pay it off. I can even pay it off more aggressively. I could cut costs over here. So you gotta, there's two steps to living a rich life. The first, you gotta know your numbers. That means you have to understand the basic language of finance. And number two, you have to master your money psychology. What I mean by that is you've got to start finding a way to feel good about money. And both of you have to talk about it regularly, positively, proactively. If you do those two things, know your numbers, master your money psychology, you can live a very rich life, even if you have credit card debt.

• 28:07Mike Carruthers?

  It is such an important topic, and it does seem that certainly a lot of people just don't talk about it, don't want to talk about it, just kind of hope for the best.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Hope is not a strategy. Okay, we are adults and it's actually possible and it's fun to engage with money. That's why I love talking to these couples. You can see them. Most of us, we spend our entire lives working. And if we just understood money just a little bit more, it's often possible that you will have more money than you ever imagined. Now, that might seem crazy. Like, what are you talking about? We're just trying to pay our bills. Well, I would ask you, have you, do you understand your investment rate? Do you know your savings rate? Do you know how much money you need for retirement? The vast majority of people will say no to every one of those questions. Then how do you know you're behind? The answer is you've got to both make a decision. We are going to live a rich life. We deserve it.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  And we're going to work for it and maybe even make some changes or compromises. But life is too short to live a tragedy of a smaller life than we have to. That's why I want people to work together with their money.

• 29:19Mike Carruthers?

  Well, this is certainly a refreshing way to talk about money and to make it fun certainly is appealing and it's a topic that's on a lot of people's minds right now. I've been speaking with Ramit Sethi. He's author of the book Money for Couples. And Ramit also has a podcast called Money for Couples and I'll put a link to the podcast and a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Ramit, thank you. It's always a pleasure.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Perfect. Great to talk to you. Thanks, Mike.

• 29:49Mike Carruthers?

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• 30:29Mike Carruthers?

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• 31:13Mike Carruthers?

  Now, that's a pretty compelling offer if you've been thinking about doing something to support your bone health. Go to getbetterbones.com/sysk. That's G-E-T betterbones.com/sysk.

• 31:30Mike Carruthers?

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• 32:14Mike Carruthers?

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• 33:01Mike Carruthers?

  A lot of how you perceive the world, you do through your sense of smell. From how food tastes, which is really largely the sense of smell, to who you are and who you are not attracted to. The human sense of smell guides you towards good things and away from bad things. And how it all works together is really interesting. Here to explain it is Jonas Olafson. He is a professor of psychology at Stockholm University, where he directs the Sensory Cognitive Interaction Lab. He's also author of a book called "The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell and the Extraordinary Power of the Nose." Hi Jonas, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Thank you, it's great to be here.

• 33:47Mike Carruthers?

  So compared to other creatures who roam the earth... Where do we humans rank in our ability to smell? I mean, when you watch a dog, for example, they're almost always smelling and sniffing their environment. And we've heard they have a really great sense of smell. But how do we compare to dogs or to two other creatures? Are we near the top of the list?

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this has been debated. And for a long time, many people assumed that the human sense of smell was atrophied or underdeveloped. But recently, there have been efforts to try to combine everything that we know about how faint smells can humans detect versus non-human animals and then compare the two. But as far as we know, humans are only outclassed by the dog in terms of how many molecules we can detect at a very low concentration. So only the dog is clearly superior to us. And so it's unfortunate to us that we interact with dogs a lot.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  So we compare our noses to theirs. And they are perhaps the outlier, whereas we have a very strong sense of smell, better than than most animals that we have studied. So the sense of smell is much better than than people typically give it credit for.

• 35:09Mike Carruthers?

  And when I smell something, what's going on? How does that work?

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so odors are basically molecules that are released from a type of surface, and they are airborne. So they have to be of a certain molecular weight in order to be carried by the air. They can't be too heavy. But they are carried in the air, and they are part of the air that we are sniffing and inhaling when we breathe in through our nose. So on the top of the nasal cavity, we have millions of little nervous cells. So the nervous system is actually exposed in the nasal cavity. And there, these molecules interact directly with these sensors on the nerve cells. And the nerve cells

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Communicate, they send an electric signal through little holes at the roof of the nasal cavity and the base of the skull actually has little perforations and those little holes, that's where the neurons travel up to the brain. And from there, all kinds of weird and exciting things happen when the brain is supposed to tease apart very complex signals that are coming from the nose, so that we are able to tell apart different smells, to remember them, to have an emotional reaction to them. All these things take place in the central parts of our brain.

• 36:41Mike Carruthers?

  One of the things I think people wonder about the sense of smell is that we smell things and sometimes the smell is very pleasurable, sometimes it's, it can make you sick, it's so disgusting. Probably most smells are somewhere in the middle, but why do we have that reaction? Why isn't a smell just a, yeah, I get that, I smell that, but sometimes it's like, oh, that's horrible?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's believed that the most fundamental function that the sense of smell has is for us to detect chemical hazards or nutritious and pleasurable food sources at a distance, so we can navigate away from certain things and towards other things, and that helps us to survive. This is found in very simple organisms, it's called chemotaxis, that's when, when like a little amoeba swims towards sucrose, if you put it in a little dish. So it's a very basic kind of attraction and revulsion mechanism, and that helps the organism to survive.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  So I think that's kind of built into our brains and our genetics, but then...

• 37:58Speaker 02

  What we have as mammals, we have a great capacity to learn, to learn to associate which are the smells that made us sick, which are the smells that turned out to be really nutritious and good food. And then we have, we carry those memories with us. And, and when we smell something, our emotional reactions are to a large extent shaped by those prior experiences and emotional reactions that we had before.

• 38:26Mike Carruthers?

  But are there people, because I could smell something presumably for the first time and say, that's really great. And you could smell the same thing presumably for the first time and say, that's horrible. Or would we need to have associated with it something else prior?

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. So a prior experience is one thing, but the individual receptor genetics, so those are the genes that are expressed in us as individuals that, that create those receptor cells that enable us to pick up certain molecules, those differ to a large extent from person to person. And that can have consequences for how, how strongly do we pick up on certain notes. So for example, someone's body odor might smell very strong and unpleasant to, to one person, whereas for a different person, it's, it's okay, or even, even very nice. But there was one interesting study in Iceland. So they have

• 39:28Speaker 02

  this local tradition of, of eating fermented shark, which smells very stinky to most people. But those who perceive this smell to be less strong, they might be able to sort of overcome this, this, this smell in order to eat food that might keep them alive. And so a particular version of this gene that makes this smell smell less strong is overrepresented in the Icelandic population, which has been heavily dependent on a fish diet. So I find that absolutely fascinating. I'm myself a big fan of Swedish fermented herring, the surströmming.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  So I might be one of those with a particular genetic setup.

• 40:15Mike Carruthers?

  But are there smells that are universally disliked? I'm thinking like decaying garbage, things like that, that nobody, nobody smells that and goes, God, that's great.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  There are odors that are on a cultural level that are disliked by all different cultures. But within those cultures, there are people who find these odors okay. So within each culture, there are individuals who have a completely different opinion about the smells. So it goes to show that the sense of smell is very individual. There might be general trends that are common across cultures. But within each culture, there are certain people who might just have, for biological or, you know, historical reasons,

• 41:10Speaker 02

  they might have a very different opinion of certain smells that other people find repusing.

• 41:17Mike Carruthers?

  So there are no smells that are universally hated or universally loved?

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Not that I'm aware, at least, no.

• 41:26Mike Carruthers?

  It's hard to imagine that people would smell like flowers or, and I've heard like vanilla or cinnamon, like if you smell that, how could you say, God, that's terrible?

• 41:36Speaker 02

  There is, actually, one of the first studies that I did was on pregnant women and their sense of smell. And one of the odors that we exposed them to was Chanel number five, the perfume. And most of the women in the sample, they strongly disliked this smell. I thought that they would really like it. It's an old perfume, but they really dislike this odor. So it's really unpredictable what people will like and dislike. It's just, yeah, it's quite fascinating how different people react.

• 42:17Mike Carruthers?

  That's really amazing, because Chanel number five is and has been a very popular perfume forever. And to find that people really dislike it like that, particularly women, surprises me.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, they thought it was kind of overwhelming and too sweet and flowery and artificial, all these things that they, um, but I suppose other people might have a completely different view, otherwise the perfume wouldn't have been so, so popular. So it, uh, it's, it really has a lot to do with, I think, cultural values, experiences, these personal tastes that we develop over our lives, but because the emotional qualities of smell are so strong, that makes us think that they must be innate.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  That's what I think is going on, that because we have this strong emotional kind of dimension to smells, we tend to believe that it cannot be learned. But when you expose people to, to smells a lot, you see that the more you, uh, the more they are exposed to it, the less unpleasant these odors tend to be. If they are unpleasant to begin with, we can get used to a lot of smells that we, that we don't find acceptable at first.

• 43:41Mike Carruthers?

  I wanted to ask you about that because it does seem very normal that people get used to smells. You can walk into a really stinky barn, full of cows and pigs and everything else, and it's overwhelmingly bad.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:57Mike Carruthers?

  But only for a while. Then all of a sudden, you kind of don't notice it anymore. After what, 20 minutes or so, it's like you, you become accustomed to it.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's also one of the, one of the basic functions of smell is that it alerts us to new smells, but once we have sort of understood what it is and we have attended to these smells, they fade into the background. And that's probably because we don't really need to attend to them anymore. We know that they, they are not dangerous. You know, the, it's the, the, the change in the chemical environment, that is what we need to be alerted to. So our noses get tired and our attention span, our attention moves away to other things very quickly when it comes to smells.

• 44:50Mike Carruthers?

  So people smell, we all, we all smell, we all have a scent.

• 44:56Mike Carruthers?

  And I've heard, and everyone's heard, that there is some connection between scent, a person's scent and their attraction, a human attraction. Can you talk about that?

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Many people feel that a pleasant body odor is a very desirable characteristic. And in women especially, an attractive body odor is as important or even more important than good looks. So it certainly is a big factor when it comes to partner, finding a partner and romantic attachment and such. Those people who lose their sense of smell, they often report that their love lives suffer. So they don't feel as connected to their partner on an emotional level as they did before. And oftentimes, they might not be aware

• 45:50Speaker 02

  that it's a sense of smell that kind of brought about this close emotional tie between them. So the sense of smell is very powerful in this regard. In surveys on US college students, for example, women tend to say that a good body odor is more preferable than good looks. For men, the looks are more important, but for women, the smell is more important.

• 46:19Mike Carruthers?

  That really surprises me because I've never, I've never talked about that with anybody. No one's ever, it's never come up in conversation that, and is a good body odor very subjective? Like, somebody could find me to very, that I smell great and others would say, no, he's not.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is very, it is very individual. And I think it's also interesting to what you said, that we don't really talk about it very often. It's really hard to communicate and talk about smells and try to put it into words what we are experiencing. So a lot of it... Kind of affects us in an unconscious way. So part of my efforts is to kind of make people aware and to talk more about smells and to attend to smells. And I think that will kind of lead to a better understanding of who we are and why we do the things we do.

• 47:17Mike Carruthers?

  One of the things about the sense of smell that I love, that I think is so great, is how it can transport you back in time, how you can smell something that reminds you of some memory and it just, you're instantly back there. It is so powerful. And at least it is for me.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, many people have at least a few of those childhood memories that can be instantly triggered by a certain smell. And yeah, it's not really well known why this happens, but we know that the sense of smell is fully developed already when we are born. So we are born with a really keen sense of smell. And that makes us probably able to encode new memories related to smell before we are able to do the same with other senses. And that is maybe why the sense of smell can bring back these old memories.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Other sensory events, they tend to bring back memory from the teenage years or young adulthood. For example, our favorite music is usually the music that we loved when we were teenagers. But with smell, it goes earlier than that. So childhood memories are evoked by the smells.

• 48:47Mike Carruthers?

  Is it normal for your sense of smell to deteriorate over time in kind of the same way people's eyesight tends to get worse over time? Is it just a normal product of aging?

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is, unfortunately. So a lot of the people who have smell impairments, they have that because of wear and tear over our lives. So as I, as I mentioned, that these olfactory receptors are exposed in the nasal cavity. So they are exposed to all kinds of things, viruses, et cetera, that we breathe in and that can, can have harmful effects. And even if the, the biological system is, is very good at regeneration and recovering from these insults, it's rarely as good as it was when we were young.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  So, so it's a normal consequence of aging. And unfortunately, unlike the sense of vision, we don't have anything comparable to, to eyeglasses to compensate for, for these impairments. So there is no technology yet for fully recovering or compensating for an impaired sense of smell.

• 50:00Mike Carruthers?

  Is it true that women have a better sense of smell overall?

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Not quite, actually. It's a notion that was present already in ancient times. Aristotle wrote that, that women had a better sense of smell than, than men. But modern research hasn't really brought that out. So if we test men and women on really faint odors, men and women tend to perform similarly. So we can detect odors at, at the same concentration. But when we ask participants to remember the smells or to describe them with words,

• 50:42Speaker 02

  women tend to do better. So they are more able to cognitively elaborate and encode the odors in memory relative to the men. So it's, it's both yes and no. They are better in some ways, but the nose is as powerful for men as in women.

• 51:03Mike Carruthers?

  What do we know about smell as it affects your behavior, your mood, your productivity?

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we know that being out in nature and smelling the natural smells of the forest, or the ocean, or those things can have a strong impact on our moods and be have positive health benefits. But it doesn't really work in an automatic way. So we can't just, you know, pump certain smells into into the ventilation system at the workplace and then people will be more productive. I think it has to do with the context in which the odors are presented and the people who are perceiving them. So there is no real shortcut, I think, to boosting productivity.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  And I think a lot of the aromatherapy effects, they are due to the fact that people put themselves in a mindful state and they use odors that they like and that they believe have these potent effects on their moods. And so there is a type of placebo effect going on as well, and people can use that for their benefit. So I'm not, I'm not a believer in using odors too much in the workplace. It might actually backfire if you have like an unpleasant work environment. Adding smells to it might make things worse, I think.

• 52:34Mike Carruthers?

  Well, as the title of your book says, smell is really the forgotten sense in that we never really think that much about it. We certainly don't give a whole lot of thought to how much it, you know, enhances the taste of food or helps us pick a mate, but it's involved in so much of our lives and yet it's all so quiet. Jonas Olofsson has been my guest. He's a professor of psychology at Stockholm University and he's author of the book, The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell and the Extraordinary Power of the Nose. And there is a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for bringing smell into the forefront, Jonas. I appreciate your time.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 53:19Mike Carruthers?

  Tonight, just before you go to sleep, just before you close your eyes, open them and take a look around. What do you see? Hopefully, you'll see nothing, but most of us have some sort of light in our bedroom. It's coming from a clock, or a gadget, or a nightlight in the hallway, or a streetlight outside, and researchers say that's no good. These researchers used hamsters for a study about nightlight, because hamsters are physiologically similar to humans. One group of hamsters got to sleep in total darkness. The other groups had to sleep exposed to dim light, either red, white, or blue. Then, the hamster's behavior was observed the next day.

• 54:04Mike Carruthers?

  The ones who slept in total darkness seemed pretty happy and enjoyed going about their tasks the next day. The ones who slept with the dim red light had a pretty good day, but the hamsters who slept with the blue or white light, they didn't do too well. They showed signs of depression and weren't all that interested in doing their tasks. Generally, they were cranky hamsters. And since hamsters are physiologically similar to humans, the recommendation is that if you need a nightlight, or an illuminated clock in your room, the best thing to do is get one that glows red. Otherwise, try to keep the room as dark as you can. And that is something you should know.

• 54:46Mike Carruthers?

  As you probably know, every week, we deliver three new episodes of Something You Should Know, and if you follow us on whatever platform you listen, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Castbox, wherever, then we will deliver these episodes right to you, so you don't have to come find us. I'm Mike Carruthers, thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 55:09Speaker 03

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• 55:38Speaker 04

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