For a long time, science believed that a person was able to distinguish only about 10 thousand different odors, but researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Rockefeller University recently conducted a new study and found that the human sense of smell can actually recognize about a trillion different odors.
In order to find out, the researchers suggested that 26 volunteers take part in the experiment. At the same time, volunteers were chosen from completely ordinary people, and not tasters and perfumers, whose nose is called “sharpened” to determine this or that smell. Before the experiment, scientists identified 128 different aromatic molecules, and then mixed them in different proportions among themselves. Each aromatic blend produced contained 10, 20, and 30 different aromatic molecules.
As the scientists say, the majority of the resulting mixtures were composed of very familiar smells.
“We wanted the volunteers to easily recognize the smell that they got, so most of the aromatics smelled disgusting and strange.”
Then each volunteer was asked to smell three vials of aromatic blends at a time: two smells that matched each other, and the third one was different. After each of the volunteers conducted a similar analysis 264 times they were asked to identify and identify a different flavor.
After that, scientists began to gradually increase the number of identical aromatic molecules in mixtures and tried to determine at what ratio odors would be impossible to distinguish. The experiment showed that the sensitivity of the human nose is significantly higher than previously thought. Volunteers each time successfully determined and distinguished odors even in cases where the aromatic components in each tube contained more than half of the same smells.
At the end of this experiment, scientists calculated how often volunteers were able to accurately and correctly identify a different smell. Armed with the information received, the researchers decided that by extrapolating by the number of all possible smells on the planet, they would be able to determine how many of them are able to distinguish the nose of an average person. At first, this task seemed impracticable, since there are billions of different aromatic molecules in the world, so scientists decided to limit their calculations by relating them to a mixture containing up to 30 different aromatic molecules. The figure was very impressive - a billion different smells.
“It's like a census. To count the number of people living in the country, it is not necessary to walk and knock at each door. If you have a sample, you can extrapolate its data. In our particular study, we knocked only a few doors, ”say the scientists.
Leslie Voscholl, a researcher at Rockefeller University, believes that the actual number will actually be much higher, but it’s unlikely that each of us could smell all the smells in the world in our daily life.
Full details of this scientific study were published in the scientific journal Science.
The article is based on materials .
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