The human nose: amazing facts about our most powerful organ
It’s not something we often think about, but our noses smell the fear, and attraction, in people; filter, warm and humidify the air we breathe; and keep out, or expel via sneezes, things that are bad for us
The nose is an undeniably important sensory tool. It helps us to breathe and to smell, affects our taste, and may even arouse our memory.
We mainly associate our nose with smell, and with 400 scent receptors located in the nostrils, noses can identify over a trillion smells – from the tempting wafts of home-made bread to the stink of public toilets.
There is evidence to suggest that women are better than men at identifying odours, perhaps because the area of the brain dedicated to processing smells is 50 per cent larger in women. Women also develop a hypersensitive nose when pregnant, which may explain the unusual cravings some experience, since 80 per cent of what you taste is determined by its scent. One man – Dutch winemaker Ilja Gort – has such a finely tuned sense of smell that he has reportedly insured his nose for US$8 million.
Researchers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands discovered that we can detect emotions – such as fear and disgust – by sniffing out the chemical signals people emit. Our noses are also responsible for detecting the pheromones the opposite sex emit, which indicate sexual arousal.
One experiment – conducted by Claus Wedekind in 1994 – suggests that we may subconsciously select partners through smell. This is because we can identify through scent that someone has different genes to our own, meaning children we produced together would have strong immune systems. Smelling our way to love, perhaps?