Smell - Tasting and Smelling



The Nose > Tasting and Smelling < Odors Problems Fun	Tasting and Smelling Our sense of smell in responsible for about 80% of what we taste. Without our sense of smell, our sense of taste is limited to only five distinct sensations: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and the newly discovered “umami” or savory sensation. All other flavors that we experience come from smell. This is why, when our nose is blocked, as by a cold, most foods seem bland or tasteless. Our sense of smell becomes stronger when we are hungry. Smell and taste are closely linked. The taste buds of the tongue identify taste; the nerves in the nose identify smell. Both sensations are communicated to the brain, which integrates the information so that flavors can be recognized and appreciated. Some tastes—such as salty, bitter, sweet, and sour—can be recognized without the sense of smell. However, more complex flavors (raspberry, for example) require both taste and smell sensations to be recognized. The average human being is able to recognize approximately 10,000 different odors. Our sense of smell is so powerful that when you smell skunk, you are smelling 0.000,000,000,000,071 of an ounce of scent. Dogs have about 200 million olfactory receptors. That is about 20 times the number of receptors that humans have. A larger portion of the brains of animals and fish are devoted to the sense of smell than that of humans. Horses can smell water far away in the desert, salmon return across thousands of miles of oceans and rivers, drawn by the odor of the stream where they were hatched years and years before.
"Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived."