One trillion different smells is incredible, especially considering that the human eye can only detect about two million distinct colors. The scientists at the Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute conducted the experiment by starting with 128 chemicals, then they mixed some together and some individually, sometimes using as much thirty chemicals in a single bottle.The test subjects would come in and smell three bottles; two bottles had the identical scent but one had a very slight different odor. The scientists then took the percentage of bottles that the test subjects correctly identified, which was very high, and then a mathematician calculated the amount of different smells they could make out of the 128 chemicals.
Using this method, they calculated about a trillion different smells. What is even more interesting is that after these scientists published the research, many other scientists got motivated and now it is believed that even one trillion is an underestimate.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/03/20/291954994/never-mind-eyesight-your-nose-knows-much-more
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THis is very interesting, what i want to know is if we can smells over a trillion different cells how come we can not distinguish a person based on smalle like a dog.How come we can not tell when someone is sad or happy based on their smell like animals can, are we not trained to do it, did it become something not needed as modern humans so we lost use of it as a species, or is it because we depend on our sight so much we block out a lot of smells. Hopefully we can find a way to re-learn this talent, and benifit greatly from it.
ReplyDeleteI think this topic is really cool because it's crazy to think of what the human body is capable of. I read some further thoughts on the issue and Dr. Leslie Vosshall, co-author to the first experiment on the number of smells a human can detect, said that animals remain two to three times better at smelling than us because they devote more of their brain to this sense. She also said that by buying strong perfumes or strongly scented items we can improve our smelling and even raise the one trillion number. By doing this we could even get to the same ranks of smelling as other animals. I think that's remarkable and something very interesting to learn about.
ReplyDeleteResearch: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-26638085
Wow that's amazing how large our sense of smell is. I think it's important to note that even though we can sense that many different smells that we our sense of smell still isn't as powerful as dogs or other animals. I think we also don't realize how much we smell because we rely on our other senses much more then smell.
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