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Your nose may be more powerful than you think.
In a single sniff, the human sense of smell can detect odors in a fraction of a second, working at a sensitivity level that “matches” how our brain perceives color, disproving the widely held belief that our sense of smell is slow. A new study titled “Feelings” suggests.
People can distinguish between different odor sequences – “A” before “B” and “B” before “A” – when the difference between odor A and odor B is only 60 milliseconds, according to the study. It was published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
“We were surprised to find that participants were able to distinguish two odors presented in the same sequence when the delay between the odors was 60 milliseconds,” said Dr. Wen Zhou, lead author and principal investigator of the study, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing in an email. Latency refers to the time between each odor presentation.
“For comparison, the duration of an eye blink is about 180 milliseconds,” Zhou added.
“Our device can be used for medical purposes, such as olfactory training for patients with a loss of smell,” Zhou said. More broadly, our findings may guide the design and development of electronic noses and olfactory virtual reality systems, with significant clinical benefits.
The researchers, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Ohio State University, built an olfactory device with check valves — devices that allow odors to flow in one direction — and Teflon tubes that can deliver odors to the human nose. with an accuracy of 18 milliseconds. The researchers asked 229 adults in China to wear this device and smell different odor mixtures: two odors were presented in quick succession in one sniff.
The scents include apple-like aromas, sweet floral aromas, lemon aromas and onion aromas. The delay between the two odors was carefully adjusted.
The researchers analyzed whether participants could distinguish between two odors presented in the same order and at different delays.
In general, two odors were presented in the same order and, conversely, when the two odors were 60 milliseconds apart in a single sniff, it became “perceptually biased,” Zhou said.
The researchers noted that they only used four odors, and said it would be useful to test a wider variety of species to determine whether the human sense of smell is more sensitive to certain odor variables or compounds.
“This could provide a deeper understanding of the computational principles underlying our olfactory experience,” Zhou said.
The new findings challenge previous research in which the time it took to distinguish between odor sequences was about 1,200 milliseconds, said Dr. Dimitri Rynberg, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Physiology at New Langone Health in New York. A study in natural human behavior.
“In music, the timing of individual notes is important for conveying meaning and beauty in a melody, and the human ear is very sensitive to this. However, temporal sensitivity is not limited to hearing: our sense of smell also notices small temporal changes in odor presentations,” he wrote. Just as it affects the perception of existing notes, the timing of individual components in a complex mixture of odors reaching the nose can be critical to our understanding of the olfactory world.”
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According to Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta, a professor in the department of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, the ability to identify odors in a single sniff may be a critical way for animals to know both what the odor is and where it is located in space. , who was not involved in the new study.
“The fact that humans differ in their sense of smell is a strong indication that olfaction is important for all species. Additionally, this study sheds important light on the mysterious mechanisms that support human olfactory perception,” Datta wrote in an email.
“The study of human smell has historically lagged behind that of sight and hearing, because as humans we think of ourselves as visual creatures,” he said. How we humans smell.