Follow Your Nose: Humans can Sniff more than Trillion Smells

You might be surprised at just how much detail your nose can pick up. In other words, the human nostrils can differentiate between more than a trillion smells, according to recent research.

"The single most important contribution of this research is that it revises this current idea that humans are terrible smellers," said Leslie Vosshall, who heads the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at Rockefeller University in New York according to Reuters. "We're very good smellers."

But don't worry. Sniffing out different scents aren't the only things we're excellent at. In fact, previous studies have shown that humans have a tendency to distinguish between several million different colors and around 340,000 audio tones.

However, what was going on inside our nose took scientists a bit longer to figure out. According to the New Scientist, as the acuity of vision and hearing are easier to measure and detect, smell can be more difficult to crack because of the high number of odorants making up just one smell.

To study this idea further, Andreas Keller and colleagues at Rockefeller University in New York City concocted mixtures of 10, 20 and 30 odorant molecules drawn from a standard set of 128 diverse odours. Twenty-six untrained volunteers were asked to sniff pairings of the mixtures in order to see if they could tell them apart.

Findings showed that each volunteer could distinguish between the two mixtures in each of 264 smell pairings. However, the more odorants shared by both mixtures in the test, the harder it was to distinguish between them.

Study results suggest that though many individuals may be good at telling various scents apart, they are not always good at describing what they are smelling.

What do you think?

More information regarding the study can be found via the journal Science.