Science & Technology

Humans can smell up to 1 trillion odours

By T.K. Randall
March 22, 2014 ·  11 comments

Stopping to smell the roses. Image Credit: sxc.hu The widely held belief that we can only distinguish up to 10,000 different smells has been blown out of the water in a new report this week that suggests the real number may be closer to 1 trillion.

To reach this figure, researchers conducted a series of experiments in which participants were asked to identify individual smells in a mixture of scents. By analyzing the cases in which participants were unable to distinguish between overlapping scents, the team was able to calculate the number of individual smells that a human nose was capable of detecting.

"My hope is that this helps to dispel the myth that humans have a bad sense of smell," said study co-author Andreas Keller.

Source: Nature.com | Comments (11)

Tags: Nose, Smell