The human nose able to kiss trillions of scent

Human nose turns out to have the ability to distinguish smells one trillion, far more than previous estimates.

For decades, scientists thought the human nose can only distinguish 10,000 smells. Before, they put the sense of smell is "lower" than the senses of sight and hearing.

"Our analysis shows the human ability to distinguish smells a lot bigger than I ever expected," said research co-author who is also the head of the laboratory of Rockefeller University Leslie Vosshall Neurogenetika was quoted as saying the AFP from the journal Science.

According to the researchers on the team, the information that the human nose — with the help of 400 receptors — only can distinguish 10,000 smells appeared in 1920 without the support of the data.

The researchers indeed have researched receptor with three eyes that can distinguish several million colors and the ear can sort out 340 000 votes. "To smell, no one was (previously) had time to test it," said Vosshall.

Vosshall and research fellows involved 26 people and a mixture of odors from 128 different molecules that can evoke the scent of citrus, grass, and a variety of chemicals. The Bebauan is divided into 30 groups.

"We don't want to bebauan it was recognized explicitly so most mix it (smelling) are weird and bad," said Vosshall. "We want the respondent noticed that ' this is the thing that is really complex and are able to choose one of them to the different ' says," he said.

Each respondent will try three bottles of scent from time to time, with two bottles of the same flavorful, while a different scents to see whether the respondents are able to differentiate the smell-the smell of it. There are 264 experiment carried the respondents.

The researchers then model a combination of smell that humans can recognize based on average smell that can be recognized in the experiment. The combination of 128 scent samples get results estimates about one trillion smell should be known to the human sense of smell.

Lead researcher, Andreas Keller, also from Rockefeller University, says, this number was almost certainly still too little. The reason, many mixing scents of others in the real world.

According to Keller, the ancestors of humans rely on their sense of smell. However, individual hygiene and refrigrasi make the scent recognition capabilities declined during the modern era.

"This explains our attitude that holds (the ability) to smell not important compared to hearing and vision," said Keller. In fact, previous researchers had known that the sense of smell is closely related to human behavior, explains how the human brain processes information that is complex.