Do you know how many different smells you can tell apart?

Don’t ask me why I am writing this here. But anything to do with the brain and the mind, I am attracted to it. So today our hot topic is about smell.

Today I saw an article in the Science Magazine about how Humans Can Discriminate More than 1 Trillion Olfactory Stimuli.

In the abstract the researchers note that:

Humans can discriminate several million different colors and almost half a million different tones, but the number of discriminable olfactory stimuli remains unknown.

If you want to know more about it, check out the paper. Its authors have affiliations with the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior and the Laboratory of Mathematical Physics, both of the Rockefeller University in New York, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in New York.

This reminded me of an article I read about some time ago in a plastic surgeon’s blog:

Scent of a Woman by Stephanie Darling.

A keen sense of smell is one of the biggest assets for a beauty editor. What happens if it disappears?

And here’s her surgeon, Dr. Marcells  on losing the sense of smell.

The Science Mag paper also reminded me of the movie: Perfume. Have you seen it? Definitely worth it.

And that brought me to thinking about the book, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind and John E. Woods published in 2001. There’s never been a book I cannot resist. But this is really intriguing, to make an understatement. Just reading the sentences takes you back to eighteenth century France in a way no other reading material does… at least for me. And the movie is like that too. Its creepy how that can be.; but irresistible.

This is why I am putting its first few lines in today’s FIRST LINES. Check it out. FIRST LINES from: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I’ll probably end up buying it anyway.

So the bottom line is, take care of your sense of smell. And let it enrich your life… Don’t ignore good and bad smells; savour them. Don’t take your sense of smell for granted. Don’t stay without looking up, just as you fail to note the singing birds everyday or the squirrel that darts past you. All of this enriches your life, and provides food for the brain. And now research is finding that its far more acute a sense than we guessed it to be.