Don’t be sniffy if you smell like a dog
by Philip Ball from on (#2PD7J)
New research debunks the belief that humans' sense of smell compares poorly with that of our canine friends
Don't you wish you could smell as well as a dog? Actually, you probably can. In a paper published in the new issue of Science, neuroscientist John McGann of Rutgers University in New Jersey describes the idea that humans have a poor sense of smell as a "19th-century myth". On the contrary, he writes, "humans have excellent olfactory abilities". So why have we been doing our noses down?
We've never had a high opinion of smell. Ever since Plato pronounced it inferior to the "noble" senses of sight and hearing, there's been a lingering suspicion that there's something primitive and animal about it. For Charles Darwin, our atrophied sense of smell was a mark of evolutionary advancement beyond our ape ancestors.
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