Quotes About Olfaction

Eighty percent of flavor comes from your nose, including a set of internal nostrils. When you chew food and hold it in your mouth, the gases that are released goes into these nostrils. People who wolf their food are missing some of the flavor.

Flavor is a combination of taste (sensory input from the surface of the tongue) and smell, but mostly it's the latter. Humans perceive five tastes—sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami (brothy)—and an almost infinite number of smells. Eighty to ninety percent of the sensory experience of eating is olfaction.

The palate of taste is limited to the five or six primary colors that the tongue can recognize; olfaction, by comparison, is seemingly limitless in the shadings and combinations it can register and archive—and retronasal olfaction can perceive aromas to which even the nose is blind.

Smell is the shortest synaptic leap in the brain to our memory, and I'm amazed that people don't sniff everything.

How much of a smell can you smell, until you can't smell it anymore?

AS PROOF of the evolutionary importance of smell, 1 to 2% of our genes are involved in olfaction, approximately the same percent that is involved in the immune system.

Depending on the breed, a canine's sense of smell is between ten thousand times and a hundred thousand times greater than ours.