Gaby
It turns out that humans can recognize a scent in just 0.06 seconds. That’s about a third of the time it takes to blink and nearly as long as it takes to identify a color.
Previously, scientists believed that the process of recognizing smells was relatively slow, as it was thought to be directly linked to our breathing rate. A full inhale and exhale takes about 3 to 5 seconds.
However, a new study has shown that we can detect subtle chemical changes in odors even faster than a single breath, according to the Daily Mail.
How Was the Study Conducted?
A team of researchers from the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a unique device for delivering scents in measured doses, activated by human smell. During the study, this device was responsible for delivering various aromas to the participants’ noses, including scents like apple, onion, lemon, and flowers.
In total, 229 volunteers participated in the study. The scientists aimed to determine how quickly participants could distinguish between two different scents presented at precisely measured time intervals and in varying orders.
The team found that when two scents were presented one after the other, volunteers could detect the difference between them in just 0.06 seconds—ten times faster than previously thought.
The experiment also confirmed that the stronger the concentration of a scent, the quicker our noses can identify it.
Dr. Wen Zhou, a co-author of the study, noted that inhaling scents is not like a “long-exposure photograph” that averages different smells; rather, it is a process sensitive to change.
In their report, the researchers stated, “Our results showed that human olfactory perception is sensitive to chemical dynamics within a single breath and provided behavioral evidence for the temporal coding of odor identity.”
The findings from this research were published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
About Another Study on Scents
In a separate recent study, a team from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany) compared the chemical composition of scent samples from 18 infants aged from just days old to three years, with 18 teenagers aged 14 to 18 years.
The team discovered that teenagers have a distinct scent made up of a mixture of sweat, urine, musk, and sandalwood. Meanwhile, the body odor samples from infants were described as reminiscent of “violet,” as well as “soap and perfume.”
