Ahhh... Stop and Smell the Roses..!!!



Up until this week I had not realized how important our sense of smell really is. It helps protect us from dangers and learn more about the world we live in. It helps us decide if something smells good or bad.  Our sense of smell begins at our nose, but it includes other parts of our head and brain. How can the nose do all of this?

Take for example, the tiny particles that come out floating after you have turned on a match. These particles are too little to be seen with the naked eye, but the nerve endings of the olfactory nerves located on the olfactory epithelium are very sensitive to them and can easily detect them once they have traveled through the air. This nerve is located high up in our nasal canals and it helps carry messages to our brain telling it that there is a burning match. The process is a little more detailed than how I have tried to explain it here, which is why I have provided a short video which might help understand this process much better.

 

 

 Also, we would not be able to taste the foods we eat if it were not for our sense of smell. Taste is a chemical sense detected by sensory cells called chemoreceptors. When an odor stimulates the chemoreceptors in the nose that detect smell, they pass an electrical impulse to the brain. The brain then interprets patterns in electrical activity as a specific odor. Olfactory sensation becomes perception, something we can recognize as smell.  Not being able to smell and taste the food you are craving to enjoy can be a great detriment for anyone. Here I have provided a video that tells of a man who faced having to live without a sense of smell after being diagnosed with viral anosmia and it nearly ruined his life.

 

Our sense of smell can help protect us from dangers because it is often our first response to certain stimuli like harmful chemicals or fumes. Imagine being in the middle of a fire and not knowing it until you see the flames!

Human beings have a weak sense of smell compared to other animals; take for instance, the bloodhound’s amazing sense of smell. As we evolved, our need to smell things quite as well diminished and as we became more civilized we began to rely on our eyes and brain more. Our sense of smell is unique in one way from all of our other senses. When you first come into the kitchen you can smell dinner or a cake in the oven but after some time you don’t smell them at all. This is because our olfactory nerve endings become less sensitive to a continuous odor and will stop sending those messages, all while remaining sensitive to new aromas. Some people are able to develop their sense of smell for a special use. A perfume maker can tell all the different smells between different flowers and a wine maker has the same talent for telling wines from each other by their smell. In my research to obtain more information about olfaction I came to find that some people firmly believe that dogs can detect cancer by smelling a person’s breathe. I have always been a skeptic about this kind of thing but feel free to make your own judgment from the following video, which talks about this and how scientists have recently begun conducting more studies with positive results in the detection of cancer by dog.

 Smell is one of the ways we have of knowing what the world has for us. Close your eyes and smell a rose, or after a long rainy day, go outside and take a sniff. And that nice green smell of fresh cut grass that tells you spring is here. How about a slice of hot apple pie? You would not be able to taste it without olfaction.  Scientists today continue to explore how it is that we pick up odors, process them and interpret them as a specific smell. There remain a great amount of controversies about olfaction, like the existence of human pheromones and how they might help us select a romantic partner or how pregnant women become more sensitive to specific odors, but for now let us leave these interesting discussions for a later time. Thank you for reading.