Hold the onions – and see if they make you cry

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Know your onions

Feedback could never be a professional chef. That’s partly because there is no way we could stand the pressure of such a frantic work environment, to say nothing of the stress of potentially running into Gordon Ramsay. But mostly it’s because we would tear up every time we had to chop an onion.

The reason some of us cry when we chop onions is a chemical called syn-propanethial-S-oxide, which gets sprayed into the air. It triggers the trigeminal nerve, which, in turn, activates the tear ducts to wash away the irritating chemical.

So far, so annoying, but also so understudied. Is everyone equally sensitive to onions, or do we vary? And are people who are more sensitive to onion chemicals also more sensitive to chemicals generally – for instance, do they have a stronger sense of smell? We don’t know.

“No research to date has explored subjective individual variability in onion tearing and its relationship to chemosensory sensitivity,” write Thomas Hummel and his colleagues in a “preliminary investigation” published on 25 May in the journal – and, fair warning, this is an absolute mouthful, so good luck to whoever’s doing the audio version of this column – Laryngoscope Investigative Otolaryngology.

Hummel’s team recruited 1001 volunteers and asked them to rate their sense of smell, the general state of their nasal passages, their sensitivity to stinging and burning sensations, and their propensity for crying over onions. The participants were also given psychophysical tests: for instance, they were given sticks imbued with odours and had to identify them.

It turned out that the people who self-reported more tearing while cutting onions also self-reported having a better sense of smell. However, the psychophysical tests didn’t bear this out. The people who said they were prone to crying over onions didn’t do any better on the sniff tests than those who said onions didn’t bother them.

Feedback has stared at these results for a day and we think what they are telling us is that people are bad at assessing their own sense of smell. As the authors put it: “These findings are consistent with previous research demonstrating low correlations between subjective olfactory ability ratings and psychophysical olfactory tests.” We suspect this is in the same category as people’s tendency to believe they are above-average at driving, telling jokes and interpreting complicated scientific data.

Happily, Feedback doesn’t suffer from this delusion. We know our sense of smell is bad, because Mrs Feedback detected the iffy scent in the living room well before we did, which is why it took us so long to find the dead mouse one of Feedback’s felines had so graciously hidden behind the sideboard.

Tidy-up time

Feedback arrives fashionably late to the trend of video games about ordinary tasks. Instead of dogfights in outer space or quests across fantastical lands, popular games such as Animal Crossing are about quotidian jobs like tidying up your village and dealing with intransigent neighbours.

It was therefore inevitable that someone would create a video game where the entire task is to sort out a huge collection of library books. Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library was released on 30 April. It’s set entirely within the walls of a library, left in a terrible mess by a mischievous fairy. The player thus faces a “long battle against the mountain of books”, as the game requires you to correctly shelve 3072 books as fast as possible. This being an arcane library, the categorisation system isn’t exactly Dewey Decimal: categories include “Romance Novels”, “Destructive Magic” and “The Travels of Otherworld”.

Feedback hasn’t played Librarian: it costs £5.29 to download and this column doesn’t have that kind of budget. However, we did watch some videos of the gameplay and found it weirdly satisfying. We imagine that, like solving a Sudoku, there may be a quiet pleasure in getting everything nicely squared away.

People seem to agree: as of 16 June, the game has nearly 15,000 reviews and 94 per cent of them are positive. Apparently, people quite like to meticulously tidy up a great big mess. It’s just a pity this inclination doesn’t seem to extend into the physical world, where people are prone to leaving towels all over the floor, throwing food wrappers vaguely in the direction of the bin and generally making a pigsty of the place. Clearly, the problem with the real world is that it is insufficiently gamified.

Think of the children

Another trend that Feedback has been slow to grasp is the semi-viral practice of booing university commencement speakers whenever they talk up the value of generative AI. To date, afflicted speakers include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; Scott Borchetta, the CEO and founder of Nashville record label Big Machine Records; and Gloria Caulfield, a real-estate development executive with Tavistock Development Company in Florida (who honestly feels like less of a get).

One can only speculate why people in their early twenties might feel inclined to boo a technology that is frequently used to create deepfakes and propaganda, gobbles up scarce electricity and is being positioned to replace all entry-level jobs. Just remember the wise words of Principal Seymour Skinner: “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.”

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