Exquisite sense Brian Stauffer

I TRY to forget about potential onlookers as I crawl around a central London park, blindfolded and on all fours. With a bit of luck, the casual passer-by might not notice the blindfold and think I’m just looking for a contact lens.

In fact, I’m putting my sense of smell to the test, and attempting to emulate the sensory skills of a sniffer dog. Just as a beagle can swiftly hunt down a pheasant using only its nasal organ, I am using mine to follow a 10-metre trail of cinnamon oil.

Such a challenge might sound doomed to failure. After all, dog noses are renowned for their sensitivity to smells, while human noses are poor by comparison. Yet that might be a misconception. According to a spate of recent studies, our noses are in fact exquisitely sensitive instruments that guide our everyday life to a surprising extent. Subtle smells can change your mood, behaviour and the choices you make, often without you even realising it. Our own scents, meanwhile, flag up emotional states such as fear or sadness to those around us. The big mystery is why we aren’t aware of our nasal activity for more of the time.

Noses have certainly never been at the forefront of sensory research, and were pushed aside until recently in favour of the seemingly more vital senses of vision and hearing. “There has been a lot of prejudice that people are not that influenced by olfactory stimuli, especially compared to other mammals,” says Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, who studies the neurobiology of human stress at Stony Brook University in New York. …