5 Interesting Facts About Smell You Probably Don’t Know

Check out these great facts about smell and the power of your nose! Smell operates through the olfactory system of the body. This sensory system process all that we smell into the brain! Learn more about smell below…

The human nose can recognise over 10,000 different smells processed in the limbic system of the brain. This is the region in the human body that processes learning, emotions and memory. This might not sound impressive, but if you compare that to sight or hearing — how many things can you remember that you saw or heard? Probably not many!

Smell is one of the only sense’s you cannot turn off. You cannot close your nose or stop it from reacting when a smell comes in contact with it!

You sense of smell and taste are referred together as the chemosensory system, because they both give the brain information about the chemical composition of objects through the same process.

80% of your ability to taste comes from your ability to smell. If you cannot smell, you cannot taste very well. That’s why when you have a cold, you lose a bit of your sense of taste. Taste buds only have sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami — all the other complexities of taste comes from the food’s aroma.

A woman’s sense of smell is much stronger than a man’s. Women’s sense of smell peaks during mensuration and when a women is most fertile.

75% of emotions are triggered by smell, making it one of the most powerful of all the senses. Because the olfactory system operates through a process called transduction, like taste, smell has a direct route to the brain. Thus, smell directly causes emotions and can trigger memories almost instantly.