The myth of human's poor sense of smell

[grampahol]

(02-08-2022, 05:50 PM)fredtoast Wrote: Can't read without a subscription, but there is no way in hell humans can small as good as dogs and other animals.

We would not train dogs to sniff stuff out if humans could do it.  Humans would have never relied on dogs for tracking and hunting if we could have done it.  

We may be "tuned" to react differently to different smells, but we can't small as well as animals.  Not even close.

Not as good as dogs, but not quite as gross either. We do have selective smell however and distinguish certain things dogs cannot such as certain spoiled foods dogs will gobble right up and certain compounds that can kill us. Where we have the advantage of course is both brains and binocular vision and the ability to manipulate things much easier. It's just not quite as simple as saying dogs are a gazillion times better at smelling everything and stopping there. The ability to distinguish certain smell very quickly is something we do very well. I have a hunch there's another thing about smell that's never discussed and it may relate to hearing in how different animals hear different sound waves while others simply drop away. Taste, sight, hearing and smelling are all done within just millimetres of each other. Personally, and it's only a guess on my part that there are quite a few senses that do things we can't quite understand and many as we already know happen at an unconscious level ..
Anyway, we as humans aren't quite as smell limited as we're lead to believe.
I do know that you can be conditioned to not smell certain things after awhile.. Ask anyone who has ever delivered pizza for a living.. After a short period the smell of fresh hot pizza loses all appeal in a car..