Sure, dogs smell better than we do. Look at those noses, taking up all that space on their faces. But are humans so bad at it?
Until now, most scientists have learned to accept the wisdom of a study done in the 1920s that showed humans being able to distinguish between somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 different scents. Then a group of white coats from Rockefeller University got together and studied the subject more in depth. In a report just published in Science, the scientists reveal how they were able to determine that humans can, in fact, distinguish between something more like one trillion different smells.
Since humans, as far as we can so far tell, can differentiate between a few milllion different colors and about a half-million different tones of sound, this led the new study’s authors to conclude that “the human olfactory system, with its hundreds of different olfactory receptors, far outperforms the other senses in the number of physically different stimuli it can discriminate.”
Says Andreas Keller, lead author of the research, in a press release: “The message here is that we have more sensitivity in our sense of smell than for which we give ourselves credit. We just don’t pay attention to it and don’t use it in everyday life.”
So while we may still be behind canines and other creatures in the smell competition, the research indicates, perhaps we too can smell things like fear or lust or joy or even success.
[Photo credit: Getty Images]
