Smell is the ability of an organism to sense and identify a substance by detecting trace amounts of the substance that evaporate. Researchers have noted similarities in the sense of smell between widely differing species that reveal some of the details of how the chemical signal of an odor is detected and processed.
In 1821 the French anatomist Hippolyte Cloquet (1787-1840) rightly noted the importance of smell for animal survival and reproduction; but his theorizing about the role of smell in human sex, as well as mental disorders, proved controversial. Many theories of the nineteenth century seem irrational or even malignant today. Many European scientists of that period fell into the trap of an essentially…
Smell is the most important sense for most organisms. A wide variety of species use their sense of smell to locate prey, navigate, recognize and perhaps communicate with kin, and mark territory. Perhaps because the task of olfaction is so similar between species, in a broad sense the workings of smell in animals as different as mammals, reptiles, fish, and even insects are remarkably similar. The …
There is no doubt that many animals have a sense of smell far superior than humans. This is why, even today, humans use dogs to find lost persons, hidden drugs, and explosives, although research on "artificial noses" that can detect scent even more reliably than dogs continues. Humans are called microsmatic, rather than macrosmatic, because of their humble abilities of olfaction. Sti…
Researchers have learned a lot about how the olfactory nerve cells detect odorants. However, they have not yet learned how this information is coded by the olfactory cell. Other topics of future research will be how olfactory cell signals are processed in the olfactory bulb, and how this information relates to higher brain functions and our awareness of smell. Scientists are only beginning to unde…
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