Do humans have a bad sense of smell? This is just a myth
This is how the human nose works. Throughout the day, special cells inside the nose capture chemicals from the surrounding sensory environment, sending signals to a burnt brain chip called an olfactory bulb. The bulb then sends information about the smell in the nose to other parts of the brain that work together to make sense of it all, combining these odors with other stimuli in our Environments or with memories or emotions that we experienced before.
Continue reading the main storyThe myth that trivializes this complex process began with Paul Broca, a French doctor of the 19th century who studied the human brain to understand what made us differ from other animals. He compared his large frontal lobe and, beneath it, the area crushed to smell the well-filled olfactory bulbs located in front of the brain of other mammals. Subsequently, he classified the animals in what were essentially called odorous (most mammals) and non-smokers (including humans).
Dr. Broca argued that large olfactory bulbs force animals to succumb to terrestrial desires, while humans had a free will nested in the large frontal lobes, which helped them to overcome the impulses caused By detecting odors. Other scientists have simplified their results without checking the actual capabilities of an animal. Sigmund Freud even suggested that mental illness results from weakened or unused human odor. In 1924, a major manual described human olfactory bulbs almost as if the evolution of superior thinking had narrowed them near unnecessary and atrophied drops.
Today, many of us learn that our pancake from an olfactory bulb is not much because other animals have relatively more systems Important to treat odors. We can think that our ability to see the world stumbles our need to feel it. And the textbooks of pedagogy and introductory biology still affirm that we can discern only 10 000 odors. But the smell influences our behavior, our memories and our emotions. There is little or nothing to prove that this is no less important than vision, and we can actually filter out billions, maybe trillions of odors.
So it is true that your dog is so good at sniffing in part because it has an extra-sensory organ, about 50 times more receptors and 40 times more space in his brain, relatively Speaking, to treat perfumes. But it is also true that you can feel a banana just as much as it can.
"The different animals in different ecological niches have different problems than they have to solve," said Dr. McGann.
What matters may not be the size or space in the brain devoted to the smell, but other things like how our odor or brain systems are wired or used . Mice and olfactory bulbs in humans, for example, differ in relative size, but the number of neurons in the interior are quite similar.
"We are all trying to understand the same sensory world, so if you are really a great animal you will have to have more neurons devoted to touch because there are lots of spaces you can tackle," Said Dr. McGann said. "But you do not necessarily need to smell more smells because you're bigger."
And there is a lot to do with our noses. Like our dog, we can follow a trail of smell if we try. We can detect the sour ping of vomiting and decide to move from a otherwise empty underground to the other. One can tell by the smell of a person s working in a cafe. And although the evidence is not solid, some scientists think we can select friends, detect fear or stress, or know if someone is sick by omitting sweat, blood or urine Another person.
"There is a real under-appreciation For the way we use our sense of smell that contributes significantly to our overall well-being, how we value food and The way we interact with our environment, "said Johannes Reisert, who is studying olfaction in rodents and has not participated in the
and a better appreciation of the powers of the" "We could create new paths to solve the problems of medicine, social communication and emotional treatment, as the consequences of a bad smell.
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