That's Fit

In my family it's well known that my dad has a great "sniffer." He detests perfume so, of course, when I was in high school I wanted to wear perfume terribly! I remember buying some with a subtle scent, then putting on the tiniest bit imaginable while I was up in my bedroom. My father, from downstairs, shouted up to me to "wipe that stuff off!" It was amazing. While I don't think many people have a sense of smell quite as attuned as my dad's, it turns out that most of us can be trained to sense danger through our sense of smell.

Scientists have determined that the human sense of smell can be trained to detect even subtle changes in smells associated with danger. Study volunteers were exposed to two grassy odors and none could differentiate between the smells. The volunteers were then given a mild shock during one of of the smells; after being given the shock they were all able to tell the difference between the two odors. MRI brain scans taken before and after shocks were administered showed a change in the olfactory cortex after the shocks.

It's official... the nose knows!

Can you smell a lemon or a banana? If not, recent research shows that you may be more apt to develop Alzheimer's Disease later on. These are odd, but interesting findings if you ask me.

In this study, subjects were asked to smell a variety of common scents from fruits to onions to cinnamon. The backgrounder here is that the microscopic lesions on the brain's region responsible for a person's sense of smell are a main hallmark of the development or onset of Alzheimer's Disease.

What about other factors that can affect a person's sense of smell that have noting to do with the possible development of Alzheimer's Disease? The raw data collected by this study weeds out any mis-correlation that I had initially thought of when reviewing the details of this study. But still, not everyone in the study was found to have cognitive impairment issues even though sense of smell was diminished.

We all know that certain animals like dogs have an incredible sense of smell -- but how about humans? In a new study, it was found that humans can track a scent trail across a field -- with all their other senses blocked.

These new finding, which were just published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest the human sense of smell doesn't get enough credit. Perhaps it is not given enough credit because we compare ourselves to other species that have high tolerances for scent accuracy.

In this study, 46 healthy young adults aged 18 to 26 were studied as they wore masks that blocked their vision; earmuffs that screened out sounds; and gloves, knee pads and elbow pads to mute their sense of touch.

Even with all that, they crawled on their hands and knees in an open field to try to find and follow a scent trail -- and after several trials, the "trained" participants easily located the scent they had been trained on.