But first, he wants to make sure you fully appreciate the power of the nose.
"We use smell, even when we're not aware of it," he says before calling in his research assistant, Eva Alden, to help him demonstrate that point in his lab.
(It is not a traditional laboratory, as indicated by the plastic bin labeled BO Materials. "We're collecting body odor on breast-feeding pads that are sewn into the armpits of T-shirts," Lundström explains.)
For instance, no flavor is as distinct without the help of your snout. Minus the sense of smell, you might discern the basics of sweet, sour, salty, or savory. But add the olfactory sensation, and vivid flavors explode.
Alden takes a Jelly Belly jelly bean and puts it in her mouth with one hand as she pinches her nose with the other. She tastes only nondescript sweetness - until she releases her nose. "Apple!"
Experiment No. 2 moves closer to love's aroma. Lundström takes a small bottle filled with one of the 120 chemicals, found mainly in men, that constitutes body odor. Half the population has the gene that enables them to detect its scent; the other half, not so much.
Lundström waves the bottle under the nose of Alden and senior research associate Leslie J. Stein; sure enough, Alden can smell it and Stein cannot.
That means Alden has a wider pool of scents - and men - to choose from when looking for her someone special. That's a good thing in the mating game.
"We know we have reproductive success when we pick a mate who is not close to us in our gene pool," Lundström says. Optimal mating means not too much inbreeding or outbreeding, and odors are a biological signal that help us find the special someone who occupies that middle ground.
