Chloe Chan: Smell

Our sense of smell is valuable and powerful, it contributes to discreet parts of our lives. Smell plays a major role to taste, without it we cannot tell if something tastes delicious or not because we can only taste sweet, salty, bitter, sour.

Our noses warm, moisten and filters the air we breathe, it also has the ability to smell odors. Odor molecules inhaled float upwards towards two small areas at the top of the naval cavity. This area is covered with 5 million tiny nerve cells which can detect 10,000 different smells. Nerves cells are different shapes and only specific molecules can fit them. Our cells send signals to the brain allowing us to recognize particular odors.

We naturally have preferences for certain smells. Our preference for certain smells has much to do with our past experiences and what we are used to as a child. It is so powerful that it can alter our preference of people and places, most of the time this happens unconsciously. As well as these things, smell can alert us to things such as danger when we smell gas. Evidently our sense of smell plays a very wide role in our lives.

http://yucky.discovery.com/flash/body/pg000150.html
http://www.sirc.org/publik/smell_human.html
http://www.senseofsmell.org/feature/odor/odor_whitepaper_1.php