Our Mysterious Sense Of Smell

The world’s leading researchers are unlocking facts about the least understood of our senses

- Lisa Fields

Your sense of smell is largely responsible for your ability to taste food. “Flavour is really an integrated experience that combines what happens on your tongue—that’s sweet, sour, salty, bitter, spicy—with smell,” says Asifa Majid, psychology professor at the University of York. “When you put something in your mouth, the molecules go into your nasal cavity. Your tongue might be able to tell that there’s fat in that chocolate, and that’s something the brain finds very rewarding, but the formal chocolate experience comes from all the molecules going into your nose.”

Women out-perform men when both groups are asked to identify a certain number of scents. That holds true across all age groups. “This could be due both to women being better able to perceive the smell and women being better at verbalising the odour—that is, providing the odour with a verbal label,” says Erika Jonsson Laukka, senior researcher at the Karolinska Institute’s Ageing Research Centre in Stockholm. Her research shows that when people were asked to memorise eight scents (including garlic, fish, turpentine, and lemon) and were then given a scent test, which included some of the original scents and some new scents, the women were better able to identify whether or not a scent was one of the ones that had been memorised. Women were also better at identifying the scents by name.