ok.. Am I alone or can someone else out there smell a food and Identify 15 ingredients or more in it? I can also smell summer, and I can Identify race by smelling someone, and I can smell a book and know the plotline or what kind of book it is. Plus all this other stuff.
My nose looks weird too. It is curved upwards, so it looks like a mini skijump. LOL!
Does anyone else have this same ability? Please explain.
Smell is subjective, but you should all know: our dependence on sight is misguided. Smell is several orders of magnitude better at discerning things than sight is, and better yet you can smell things that you wouldn't have a hope of seeing. Hearing, too, is superior to sight.
Why do humans use sight so much? You can think about that one, it's an interesting question to ponder.
As for smell, most of those things are well within the realm of plausibility. As long as you pay good attention you can train your brain to recognise what comes through the olfactory inputs with alarming accuracy- certain food and fragrance companies employ professional sniffers (yes, humans) to identify and pioneer new scents, and in order to qualify you need to be able to detect up to 40 different substances in the same mixture in the blink of an eye, and up to 2000 different substances.
Because I am a walking culinary disaster, my food smelling abilities are rudimentary. However I can smell weather (if you know your surrounds enough you can also tell the direction of the prevalent winds as well as when the rain's gonna come in), differentiate between race (this is not being racist), and, provided I've gotten the scent, recognise people by smell. These are all parts of functions and behaviors that we may have had to rely on in the past but not so much these days.
On which note...what is your attitude to perfumes, aftershave and deodorant?
