Whether it’s freshly baked bread or bacon frying, enticing smells are a way to get your kids running.
Now experts have discovered just how fast our sense of smell is.
It has long been thought that our ability to detect different aromas is a ‘slow’ sense because it depends on our breathing rate: a full inhalation and exhalation takes about 3-5 seconds.
However, scientists have discovered that we can actually detect fine chemical changes within the duration of a single sniff.
The team from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a unique sniff-activated device that controlled the release of different odors.
Scientists have discovered that we can actually detect fine chemical changes within the duration of a single sniff (stock image)
These odors included chemical compounds that had apple-like, onion-like, lemon-like, or flower-like odors.
A total of 229 participants were tested to see if they could distinguish between two different odors that were presented to them at precisely measured delays and in different orders.
They found that when the two odors were presented one after the other, participants could tell the difference when the delay was just 60 milliseconds – 10 times faster than previously thought.
This speed is about a third of the time it takes us to blink – and is comparable to how quickly we perceive different colors.
When the two odors were presented one after the other, participants were able to tell the difference when the delay was just 60 milliseconds – 10 times faster than previously thought (stock image)
Dr. Wen Zhou, one of the authors of the study, said that sniffing odors is not a ‘long exposure shot’ where different odors are averaged out, but is sensitive to changes.
Writing in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the team added: ‘Our findings demonstrate that human olfactory perception is sensitive to chemical dynamics within a single sniff and provide behavioral evidence for a temporal (time) code of odor identity.’
Previous research has shown that the smell of a teen’s room – something most parents will be familiar with – actually has its own unique chemical makeup.
Researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany compared the chemical composition of body odor samples from 18 babies between zero and three years old, and 18 teenagers between 14 and 18 years old.
The team discovered that teenagers have a special smell, consisting of a mix of sweat, urine, musk and sandalwood.
Meanwhile, babies’ body odor samples were described as “violet-like” and “soapy and perfume-like.”