iPhone attachment releases food odors to trick brain

If music can be portable, why can't smell? The scentee is an iPhone gadget, created by a Japanese company also incidentally called scentee, that expels the succulent odors of grilled meats at the owners bequest. Aromas are prepackaged in the form of swappable scented cartridges and include flowery fragrances as well; simply plug the spherical looking device into the headphone jack, from which it draws power, and prepare for some hardcore sensory overload.  

  
Scentee resembles the gameboy camera peripheral of the nineties

Using a special app called Hana Yakiniku or “nose grilled meat” in English, users can select between Korean style barbeque short ribs, grilled beef and buttered potatoes. The idea, as demonstrated in the promotional video, is to trick your brain into recalling these tastes even if you're plowing through something completely different. For any vegetarians struggling with relapse, the scentee can provide that quick fix without the mental turmoil of failure. Jokes aside, Scentee's CEO Koki Tsubouchi ascertains the app and phone combo are more for fun than anything else. However, there's something to be said over a scent's influence of taste. We've all been here before: holding our breath to the avoid the taste of foreign medicine or our significant other's botched attempt at a new recipe, and the bottom line is that taste cannot function without smell. As soon as nose breathing resume, that awful taste rushes back in full circle. Don't believe me? Try pinching your nose while tasting something.

Marcia Pelchat, a sensory psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, confirms to NPR that “tongues are able to distinguish between sweet, savory, bitter and tart. But smell provides a lot of the variety in flavor.” She adds that taste is no substitute for texture; to truly deceive the mind, then the substituted food's texture must closely resemble the one whose scent is emulated.

Scentee will be released at the end of November in the United States, retailing at approximately $35 for the unit with a subsequent $5 for each cartridge. Best of all, Tsubouchi promises that future scentee apps will be centered around a phone's alarm clock, text messaging and social media alerts. Waking up the smell of bacon and eggs anyone? Or perhaps fresh flowers? There's no word if the app is Android compatible or open source; something of this nature begs to be tinkered with – DIY remote controlled fart machine anyone?

story via NPR