As you read this, take a whiff. What smells do you detect? How do these smells affect how you feel?
It’s rare that people consciously take in the smells around them, but a new review argues that the human sense of smell is more powerful than it’s usually given credit for, and that it plays a bigger role in human health and behavior than many medical experts realize.
"The fact is the sense of smell is just as good in humans as in other mammals, like rodents and dogs," John McGann, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in New Jersey and the author of the new review, said in a statement .
People often think of dogs and rats as the superior sniffers in the animal kingdom, but humans also have an extremely keen sense of smell, McGann argued in the review, which was published today (May 11) in the journal Science . In fact, humans can discriminate among 1 trillion different odors , McGann wrote, far more than a commonly cited claim that people can detect only about 10,000 different smells.
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