The specific smells they chose—smoky, strawberry, lavender, kerosene, rose, honey, cheese, and chocolate—were listed on a computer screen. The only thing their twenty-six volunteers had to do was sniff the air coming from an exhaust port and say which thing they were smelling. With between one and four components, the subjects confidently and quickly picked out the smells in the mix. But if the mixture had more components, they slowed way down . . . and their accuracy dropped to nothing. After four different smells, the human brain basically chunks them all together, and that gestalt aroma
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