Nose Blindness

“The idea behind nose blindness is that the olfactory system is designed to detect changes in our environment,” says olfactory scientist and experimental psychologist Pam Dalton, PhD, MPH, who conducts research on nose blindness and scent at the Monell Chemical Senses Lab in Philadelphia. “When a chemical is present for a long period of time—and by long, it could be a minute to five minutes to an hour—the receptors in the nose stop responding to it because it’s no longer providing new information.