The Face Hole Series
Interesting Facts about Your Sense of Smell
And The Reason Perfumers Put Cat Pee in Perfume
Did you know you can smell fear? Beyond the stench of smelly armpits, terrified sweat contains pheromones that trigger the parts of our brains that sense fear. We can smell other emotions too: disgust, happiness, and even sexual arousal. All in, we can sense over one trillion different odors, even if we aren’t aware of them. We can even smell teen spirit.
Smell is evolutionarily one of our oldest senses. Its acuity peaks in our mid-teens, and women have a stronger sense of smell than men.
Although it seems logical that our noses do the smelling, they are merely the face hole that allows the odors in. Smell happens in the cluster of nerves we call the olfactory nerve. Those roughly 12 million nerve endings are located between our eyes, upstream from the cribriform plate, a thin bone perforated with tiny holes. Odor molecules get up there in one of two ways: by breathing them in through our noses or up the back of our noses when we chew food. (Odor makes up nearly 75% of flavor.) Once there, the odor molecules dissolve in the mucus, and a scent is born.
When the olfactory or smell nerve is stimulated, it sends a signal not only to the olfactory bulb, which…
