Humans have a speedier sense of smell than we thought
- Published
Imagine getting home from school and immediately heading for the fridge for a snack, but you are greeted with a stink the second you open the door!
Yep, that's your dad's favourite smelly cheese again.
Well, scientists have recently discovered that humans have a much faster sense of smell than previously thought.
The team at the Chinese Academy of Science wanted to measure how quickly we detect scents but found it is very hard to measure.
So they created a device which was activated by a human sniff.
The experiment asked people to detect two smells - one after the other - and say when they noticed the change in odour.
They did this by using two bottles containing different scents, for example, one containing an onion smell, and the other lemon.
These bottles were hooked up to a nosepiece using tubes of different lengths.
These tubes were fitted with a special valve that opened when the participant took a sniff.
Because the tubes were different lengths, the two smells reached the volunteers' noses at different times.
They were asked to say which smell they could detect first and then carry out the experiment again, but the order of the smells was sometimes reversed.
Could you sniff out an onion quickly?
The results showed that participants could tell the difference between the smells with only a 60-millisecond delay.
That is three times quicker than blinking your eyes!
The team is hoping these results will open the doors to more research in this area.
One of the study's authors, Dr Zhou, compared the new discovery to how quickly humans detect colours.