Olfaction could influence how people respond to threats or select a partner. To investigate, researchers need to design experiments that can capture its effects.
A young woman sits in a reclining chair in a laboratory, waiting to participate in what she thinks is an effort to test some electrocardiography equipment. A researcher enters the room, greets the volunteer, and shakes her hand. After a brief chat, the investigator steps back out of the lab — and in seconds, the volunteer brings her hand to her face and sniffs.
But olfaction researchers now think that humans can extract rich information about other people from the smells they produce, including cues that might influence our behaviour and emotional state. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought fresh urgency to this research, as many people grapple with the unexpected fallout of losing their sense of smell for weeks, or even many months.
This minimization of the role of smell is due, in part, to a limited understanding of our complex odour-sensing apparatus. The relative size of the human olfactory bulb is smaller than might be expected, occupying 200 times less of the brain’s volume compared with the mouse olfactory bulb. But both structures contain around 10 million sensory neurons. In fact, that number is remarkably consistent across a diverse range of mammalian species.
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