​We are taught to read, write and listen. Why not to smell?
 
By Luke Vorstermans
 
"We breathe in pairs, except for two times in our lives. At birth, we take our first breath; at death we exhale for the last time.

"Every day, we breathe about 23,040 times moving over 438 cubic feet of air. It takes but two seconds to inhale and three seconds to exhale. During this, odors flood our smell (olfactory) receptors with information of our surrounding environment.
 
"Scents swirl around us, enter our bodies and emanate from us. Whether the aroma is dispersed in the environment or delivered discreetly through an aromapod, we are constantly immersed in them."  - Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses.

​By Luke Vorstermans
 
The nose knows…
 
Rabbits can smell danger before they can see it. Squirrels can find the acorns they buried months before. Bloodhounds can trace a lost child across miles of rugged terrain. This amazing sense of smell originates in two small patches of several million odor-detecting cells nestled high in the nasal passage. A rabbit has over 100 million of these cells, and a dog has over 220 million. By comparison, a human has only about five or six million. Yet even though the human sense of smell may not be as heightened as many other creatures, we can still detect thousands of different scents.

Aromas delivered to the smell receptors in our brains have a powerful effect on behavior.
 
By Luke Vorstermans
 
Compared to our other senses, little is known about our sense of smell. It is certainly taken for granted the most. Though we rarely think about it, our sense of smell goes about its critical business of helping us in every facet of our lives.
 
The brain processes information delivered through our other senses -- sight, sound, taste and touch -- by mental identification first, which in turn triggers an emotional response. But our sense of smell does the opposite. Incoming odors are processed by how we feel about them and then identified.