The Nose Knows More Than You Think!

 You’ve read stories about how great dogs are at using their nose to identify bombs, diseases, drugs, the status of a person’s health and much more.

Well, it turns out we humans are no slouches in this sniffing ability. The problem is we’ve just disconnected with using our noses in our everyday life. Instead, we use our vision in a lot of situations.

While researchers have thought we might smell 10,000 odors, that number has jumped to at least 1 trillion different odors (You read it right – not 1 billion, but 1 trillion!).

The problem today is we don’t have words to describe these trillion smells and much of smelling is also subconscious. It’s similar to an Eskimo having 50 ways to say snow and we have just a couple. The odors also feed into the cortical areas of the brain which relates to arousing emotions and memories without arousing a person’s emotions which is why we may not be conscious of what we are smelling.

Let me give you an example. Researchers collected body odor samples from 20 male university students. Other students watched a video of an actual assault while they were given all 20 samples to smell. They were then given 5 samples and told that told one of the samples was the suspects. Only one of the samples was from one of the male volunteer students. The smellers were able to identify the suspect 75% of the time! Quite impressive considering there was no training done to make the nose more accurate in its ability to smell.

We might start to say that body odor is like a fingerprint – it’s unique to that person!

Humans can even beat dogs in some areas. One area is that humans have a better nose for plant odors than dogs. This is probably due to humans eating plants and dogs don’t, so it’s to our benefit to be able to smell a tree that has ride fruit on it. Since dogs don’t eat plants for their survival, why bother to develop the ability to smell them? The dogs were better than humans when it came to smelling fatty acids which are in meat.

Another study looked at sweat samples and facial movements. The study had people watch videos that were either pleasant or scary. Another group of volunteers then sniffed the different sweat samples. What the researchers found was that when the people who watched the pleasant video had their sample smelled, the sniffer had a genuine happy facial expression. 

When the volunteers were given the sample that was worn by  the person who watched the scary video, the smeller’s faces twisted in disgust.

The researchers thought if you go into a dangerous place, you may know it was dangerous if someone else was in there five minutes before and if that person felt scared. Maybe that’s how Haunted Houses work during Halloween – it’s our nose that knows someone was just scared in that place.  

So…trust your nose, it may be smarter than you think!
(Reported Discover Magazine, November 2017)