Studies have already shown that Autism Spectrum Disorder ( ASD ) affects the way a personseesandhearsthe world around them . Now , researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have come across that individuals with ASD interpret smells ( specifically those of human odor ) differently from others . The paper was published in the journalNature Neuroscienceearlier this week .
True , a human ’s sense of look is not as powerful as that of , say , a sniffer dog , but we do rely on it consciously and not as a way of life to communicate . When you call up of body olfactory perception ( BO ) you might render a co - worker or relative who could shower a footling more often . Yet these smells are often so insidious that we do n’t even notice them – on a conscious level anyway .
emotion such as happiness , hostility , and fearproduce their own odorsand when we get one of these smells , it can affect our own mood and behavior without us realize . This means the ability to sense and read smells plays a very crucial role for us socially .
One of the defining trait of ASD is a difficulty in recognizing social cues so Noam Sobel , from the Institute ’s Neurobiology Department , and his team settle to look into the link between smell and autism with a series of experiment . They found that people with ASD were no speculative at detect BO than people without , but they answer to the odor in very different way .
For the first experimentation , the scientists tested anall - malegroup of volunteers ( some with ASD and some without ) by expose them to two types of sweat . Batch one had been collected from a group of multitude taking part in a scary body process ( a sky dive class ) and so contained a veneration - induced chemical substance . Batch two was taken from that same radical of people , but when they were do , which , at least in theory , should n’t get any concern chemical substance .
The dominance group reacted much as the scientist would have expect – they exhibited fearful reaction to the first batch and not the second . The chemical group with ASD did the opposite . The scientists observe they showed a measurable rise in anxiety level in response to batch two .
The following experiments produce similar solvent : participants with ASD appear calmer when exposed to reverence - induce smell and evince higher stage of anxiety when they were not . These findings suggest that people with ASD can record olfactory social cues but they misinterpret them .
" We are still speculating , at this point , but we are hoping that further research in our lab and others will clear up both the role of these unconscious olfactory social cues and their radical in such societal disorders as autism , " Sobel explained in astatement .
