I have been celebrating Eid far from home for six years now. Of course, I miss home, the friends, the family, and especially that feeling of everyone just gathering and chilling together. Every Eid, the routine is the same: funny voice notes, video calls, and scrolling through social media watching everyone show up in new outfits with, of course, lots and lots of food. That last part is what I still miss the most.
People are scattered across different cities and different countries. So we connect through video calls and share our greetings, and honestly, that part is still joyful. But the food? I simply cannot eat or even smell it from thousands of miles away. And no technology in the world has fixed that yet.
What gets me is how incredible everything else already is. I can see pictures of every dish in stunning detail. I can watch cooking videos so vivid I can practically hear the sizzle. I can even, somehow, clearly hear the sound of bites from the other side of the planet. And I just sit there and sigh. I find myself thinking… why can’t we at least smell through our phones? There is a Bengali (originally Sanskrit) saying: gondhe aadha khaoa – smelling is half of eating. I never appreciated it as much as I do now.
We often underestimate smell. It is treated like a background sense, one we only notice when something is burning. But not everyone thinks this way. The Japanese have a centuries old practice called kōdō, literally “listening to smell” – a meditative art of giving full attention to incense. And science is catching up too. A 2015 study by Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science found that people unconsciously sniff their own hands after a handshake, picking up on social chemical signals without even realizing it1. We are smell-driven creatures. We just forgot.
So I did what felt natural – I asked generative AI. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude all got the same question: why can’t we send smell the way we send sound and video? All three agreed on the core problem: sound and video are waves, forms of energy we can digitise and transmit. Smell is molecules, actual physical matter that has to enter your nose to be perceived. You cannot compress a molecule into a file. All three AI systems also pointed out what researchers call the “cartridge problem”: any smell sending device would need reservoirs of chemicals, like a printer needs ink, which is a messy and impractical proposition for something you carry in your pocket. And all three noted that smells linger and mix in ways that sound simply does not2-4. Claude added something: the science of matching specific molecules to perceived smells is still genuinely incomplete. We do not even have a full map yet5.
It is not just an engineering problem; We do not fully understand the recipe. And even if we did, it still would not truly be your mother's biryani. Scholars in digital humanities call these kinds of copies "surrogates": not replicas, but new mediated objects that resemble the original without ever being it. A photograph of a meal is already a flattened, diminished version of the real thing. A digitised smell would be no different.
Here is what makes things stranger still. While we are waiting for technology to give us digital smell, we are apparently losing our real world ability to smell in the meantime. Research suggests that modern lifestyles, more time indoors, more screens, more pollution, are gradually dulling our olfactory sense6. And losing smell is not trivial. Studies have linked smell loss to depression, anxiety, and cognitive decline7. The limbic system, which processes smell, is the same part of the brain tied to memory and feeling8. A world with less smell is, in a measurable way, a less felt world. During COVID-19, many patients who lost their sense of smell also reported losing joy, appetite, and emotional connection to their own memories. Smell is not just comfort. It is mental health.
So what do we do? Maybe the answer, for now, is simply to use our noses more deliberately. Step outside. Notice the smells around you in everyday moments. Perhaps paying attention to smell is its own form of mindfulness. Pay attention to the smell of rain, of a ripe mango, of someone’s kitchen during a celebration. Technology will probably get there eventually, but until then, smell is the one thing that belongs entirely to the real world. And maybe we have quietly accepted digital substitutes for so many things without realising it. But smell never gave us that option. And perhaps that is exactly why it still hurts to miss it.
Edited by: Angela Kim
References
- Frumin I, Perl O, Endevelt-Shapira Y, et al. A social chemosignaling function for human handshaking. eLife.2015;4:e05154. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05154
- OpenAI. ChatGPT (May 2026 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com
- Google. Gemini (May 2026 version) [Large language model]. https://gemini.google.com
- Anthropic. Claude (claude-sonnet-4-6, May 2026 version) [Large language model]. https://claude.ai
- Mori K, Sakano H. How is the olfactory map formed and interpreted in the mammalian brain? Annu Rev Neurosci.2011;34:467–499.
- Pellegrino R, Sinding C, de Wijk RA, Hummel T. Habituation and adaptation to odors in humans. Physiol Behav.2017;177:13–19.
- Kohli P, Soler ZM, Nguyen SA, Muus JS, Schlosser RJ. The association between olfaction and depression: a systematic review. Chem Senses. 2016;41(6):475–486.
- Herz RS. The role of odor-evoked memory in psychological and physiological health. Brain Sci. 2016;6(3):22.