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"Humans Can Track Like Dogs; No Word on Tail-Chasing"

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Err what is silly about sniffing your way around? :bluThinki

I do :o

When I was pregnant I used to joke that I could smell like a dog. Basically my sense of smell became that good I entered this very strange landscape of differant leaf molds and coumarins. Which you just dont sense otherwise. The smells you get off people are shocking, sex and drugs you can tell what people have been doing :eek: . A&E depts smell the closest to a human abitoir I ever want to be. :aargh4:

Now I am not pregnant, I still like using all my senses, when I am out. I feel it makes the experiance of nature more complete. I dont' sniff people.
 
i've found from personal experience that the the human sense of smell can go from virtually non-existent to fairly sophisticated in a short time, maybe a year or less.
my sense of smell was terrible when i lived in a city, through my own choice (if that makes sense?), but now i'm in pastures greener so to speak, and especially since making the effort to increase my awareness, i find that my sense of smell is excellent ( or loads better anyway :) )
e.g I've made peanut butter on toast on a sunday morning, then on monday been able to smell it in the air and know it was there as clearly as if i could see it. sounds odd, but honestly its true.
To me its about concentrating, and realising how sensitive it actually is. If you can spend a week in the woods - eat very bland food - porridge is ideal, and see how exagerated your senses become. they're there, just dormant.
you ears are just the same, a musician can hear the brand of strings they have on their guitar, admittedly within reason, but ask a seasoned guitar player(20yrs playing or so) and they'll most likely aggree and be able to suggest even finer nuances.
i think they they all add up with memory and help create a sort of sixth sense.

often we're over stimulated most of the time, so we dont get the chance to use the subtler side of our senses.
 
Ah, I don't mean that it's silly to use the sense of smell, just that it
created an amusing image in my head of undergraduates play acting
as bloodhounds or similar.

According to the "QI" book which I've pinched off my dad "The most
recent research on noses, incidentally, shows that we use each of
our two external nostrils* to detect different smells, breathing different
amounts of air into each to create a kind of nasal stereo."

The web page of Noam Sobel (the chap who did the research mentioned
in the article) says something similar: "We have shown that because airflow
is slightly different in each nostril, each nostril is in fact hyper tuned to better
perceive different odorants. In other words, when humans take a sniff, each
nostril conveys to the brain a slightly different olfactory image. "

*The book says we've got four nostrils, two we can see and two we can't.

Who am I to argue? :D
 
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