THE OLFACTORY SYSTEM – WHAT WE KNOW AND DON’T KNOW PART 1

“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.

Keith Kelsen Scent Narrative – ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT

Relative to our other senses, our sense of smell wins by far more than a nose! On average, we can hear around 20,000 different frequencies, and we can see and distinguish more than 16 million colors. But when it comes to the nose and our olfactory system, we can smell over 10 billion different scent ingredients! Yes, that’s right, 10 billion! This is one of the reasons why our sense of smell is the most powerful sense that we possess, combined with the fact that we can remember 35% of the things we smell versus 15% of what we see.

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