Oct 12, 2015 12:14 AM
(This post was last modified: Oct 12, 2015 02:26 AM by Magical Realist.)
Sorry guys..Not THAT one!
"Human beings tend to think of themselves as visual first, auditory second, then touch and taste.
Down at the bottom of the five senses is smell -- at least when it comes to how often we're aware of it.
And while we all know how pungent a bad smell can be, and how memorable a good smell is, we probably don't think our olfactory sense is all that sensitive, at least compared to the rest of our senses -- or to the keen sense of smells exhibited in the animal world (sharks can't literally smell fear, but they can distinguish the smell of fish even if they make up only one part for every 10 billion parts in the water).
While scientists estimate that human beings can discriminate between several million different colors and almost half a million different sounds, they have long assumed that we can distinguish perhaps 10,000 different odors. Most of the time humans are barely aware they're smelling anything at all.
But in reality, our noses are incredibly sensitive -- and a new study published in Science provides evidence of just how amazing our sniffers are.
Researchers at Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) tested volunteers' sense of smell using precisely crafted mixtures of odor molecules. After extrapolating the results, the researchers estimated that the average human being can distinguish between 1 trillion different odors, if not more, which makes our noses far more sensitive than any other organ in the body.
"The message here is that we have more sensitivity in our sense of smell than for which we give ourselves credit," said Andreas Keller, a research associate at Rockefeller's Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior and the lead author on the Science study, in a statement. "We just don't pay attention to it and we don't use it in everyday life."
The idea that human beings could only distinguish between 10,000 smells has been around since a 1927 study that posited four elementary odors that people are able to distinguish on a nine-point scale. Do the math and you get 6,651 discernible olfactory sensations, a number that was later rounded up to 10,000.
Although that value was widely cited, most scientists were skeptical -- after all, the human eye uses just three light receptors to see millions of colors, while the typical nose has 400 different olfactory receptors. But as Leslie Vosshall of HHMI and another study co-author noted: "For smell, nobody ever took the time to test."====http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/21/health/time-nose-scents/
"Human beings tend to think of themselves as visual first, auditory second, then touch and taste.
Down at the bottom of the five senses is smell -- at least when it comes to how often we're aware of it.
And while we all know how pungent a bad smell can be, and how memorable a good smell is, we probably don't think our olfactory sense is all that sensitive, at least compared to the rest of our senses -- or to the keen sense of smells exhibited in the animal world (sharks can't literally smell fear, but they can distinguish the smell of fish even if they make up only one part for every 10 billion parts in the water).
While scientists estimate that human beings can discriminate between several million different colors and almost half a million different sounds, they have long assumed that we can distinguish perhaps 10,000 different odors. Most of the time humans are barely aware they're smelling anything at all.
But in reality, our noses are incredibly sensitive -- and a new study published in Science provides evidence of just how amazing our sniffers are.
Researchers at Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) tested volunteers' sense of smell using precisely crafted mixtures of odor molecules. After extrapolating the results, the researchers estimated that the average human being can distinguish between 1 trillion different odors, if not more, which makes our noses far more sensitive than any other organ in the body.
"The message here is that we have more sensitivity in our sense of smell than for which we give ourselves credit," said Andreas Keller, a research associate at Rockefeller's Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior and the lead author on the Science study, in a statement. "We just don't pay attention to it and we don't use it in everyday life."
The idea that human beings could only distinguish between 10,000 smells has been around since a 1927 study that posited four elementary odors that people are able to distinguish on a nine-point scale. Do the math and you get 6,651 discernible olfactory sensations, a number that was later rounded up to 10,000.
Although that value was widely cited, most scientists were skeptical -- after all, the human eye uses just three light receptors to see millions of colors, while the typical nose has 400 different olfactory receptors. But as Leslie Vosshall of HHMI and another study co-author noted: "For smell, nobody ever took the time to test."====http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/21/health/time-nose-scents/