[Sxubas]

I'm a little bit skeptical but i dont have any objective argument or experience in the field to justify it. I didn't want to post it, but I was surprised that almost no one in the hn comments had the same feeling.

Don't get me wrong, I would love this finding to be replicable, it would be pivotal as what other nerves could we stimulate to change perception (think pain, mental health issues, loss of senses).

Also, I wonder if this could take us closer to understand a little bit more of how the brain works. Like this could be a great way for normalizing 'inputs' and see how different brains react to it.

Very very exciting news, but I will hold on my hype until someone else can replicate this result.

[exomonk]

>> We reliably produced distinct scents such as a campfire burn or fresh air!

These are exactly the types of smells people report when they get head CT scans (I've experienced it myself). Always thought it was ozone forming but perhaps it's more interesting than that.

[nickff]

I believe that ozone is usually reported as smelling like pansies (the flowers).

[pygy_]

This is TFUS [1] with a novel target.

It looks like independent hackers with a strong technical background and little regard for decorum.

Their methodology seems reasonable, and their results are plausible.

I’m reserved about the final part of the post where they moot about applications, but the core result seems solid. They elicited osmosphenes like one can elicit phosphènes by targeting the visual cortex.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_focused_ultrasoun...

[stinos]

Don't get me wrong, I would love this finding to be replicable, it would be pivotal as what other nerves could we stimulate to change perception (think pain, mental health issues, loss of senses).

There's quite a lot of research in this direction (stimulation, be it ultrasound or otherwise) to tackle exactly things you mention. Not completely sure but probably stimulators to suppress epilepsy are the most common. It has been proven in animal research stimulating the right area induces visual stimuli - IIRC this has been tested and confirmed in humans as well, i.e., make people see again. And there's more going on.

In the end: everything in the brain is electrical current. Meaning that in theory stimulating the right bits can do pretty much everything.

[glenstein]

Chiming in as a reply to your comment since I had a similar feeling. There's no... institution!? No university or other institution listed. They list author names, which is something. But no institution, no paper, no heritage of research concepts. No citations outside of a few NIH ones not especially specific to their particular experiment. No real meaningful discussion of mechanisms. The domain itself doesn't have anything other than this page. Granted, whatever, there's no rules in this world, do what you want. But so far there's precious little in the traditional signals we typically rely on to distinguish this from misinformation.

This reminds me a bit of the escherian staircase video from 10+ years that went viral. A bunch of college students walking down the stairs, acting amazed when they found themselves back at the top. It was great acting and video editing, but it was fake and all part of, if I recall correctly, an art project.

I don't want to dismiss it outright either, seems cool as hell. But it's remarkable to me that all it takes is a blogpost to get this amount of uncritical acceptance of a demonstration.

[nine_k]

Microorganisms, the greenhouse effect, and celestial bodies Uranus and Pluto were discovered by people without prior scientific credentials. If somebody stumbles upon an interesting observation which cannot be explained by an obvious mistake, it's worth taking and reproducing seriously.

[glenstein]

Every raving crank tells this story to themselves about how they're the next Galileo, and that they are the exception that warrants suspending our skills for critical interrogation.

I think this is cool, plausible and warrants investigation, but not suspension of disbelief. There needs to be a better way to go about this than responding "what about Galileo!?" to any principled application of critical thinking.

[estimator7292]

Your offhand dismissal of citizen science with an anecdote about an endless stair video edit is not a well principled application of critical thinking.

One has to set prejudice to the side and examine the claim being made to apply criticl thinking.

[glenstein]

This is a spectacular misread of my comment on practically every level. I noted the absence of numerous contextual things we typically, appropriately(!), rely on as indicators of credibility, gave an example of unsourced video illustrating what can go wrong, and emphasized that I wasn't dismissing it outright! If this is a words-mean-things conversation then those are meaningful points you haven't even pretended to address.

[thaw13579]

I agree there are some red flags here to me. One is the priority claim "As far as we know, no one seems to have done this kind of stimulation before - even in animals." The other is the definitive conclusion based on weak experimental design and documentation, "Can ultrasound make you smell things that aren’t there? Turns out, yes!"

These are big scientific claims, but the work is clearly too premature to make those conclusions, and it lacks the connection to prior work and peer review needed for making priority claims. It's really great hacker-tinkering work though, and it could turn into solid science if they take more care with it.

If this effect is real and truly novel, my cynical expectation is that someone already established in focused ultrasound will read this, apply a more rigorous approach, and get the recognition that they are hoping for through more establish channels.

[thaw13579]

I wonder where they got their equipment and research space. A charitable explanation is that they purchased it out of their own pockets, but otherwise, they really should acknowledge their support if it's from a university, federal grant, foundation award, etc. In my opinion as someone with domain experience, they don't show any novel solutions to accomplish this, it's mostly just that they have the time and resources to experiment try out, so it's especially important to acknowledge who enabled it.

[glenstein]

One retraction, this does actually have quite rich discussion of physical mechanisms. And the point at the end about open ended signal transmission is fascinating due to limited olfactory post-processing is fascinating.

[Sxubas]

Ad verecundiam. One does not need to be in a institution to come up with interesting observations/ results.

To be frank the reason that make me question it the most is how repetitive the redaction is. Seems LLM-like.

However, that's not a valid reason to discard an interesting result.