Interesting Research News
Humans could develop bloodhound-like skills if they spent more time detecting scents, it emerged today.
New research shows people can follow trails across countryside like dogs, using the sense of smell alone.
The study, published in Nature magazine, suggests humans are just out of practice at smelling, after people who repeatedly tracked smells across fields became faster and more accurate.
One of the reasons that dogs are so good at identifying smells are because they sniff so quickly, it was found.
The team also discovered that having two nostrils vastly improved mammals’ ability to identify whiffs with a sniff.
Researchers set up a scent trail of chocolate essential oil in an open grass field and asked 32 people whether they could follow the 10m-long line using their nose.
Two-thirds could, but when their noses were artificially blocked none of the volunteers were able to complete the trail, showing their sense of smell alone had guided them.
For the next stage, four volunteers completed three different trails a day for two weeks. Researchers found that as they got more experienced at following scents, they completed the distance more quickly and stuck more closely to the trail.
It was also found that they sniffed more quickly. One of the report authors, Noam Sobel from the University of California, said: “We interpret these results to suggest that, as subjects increased their speed, it was necessary for them to sniff more quickly to get the same quality of information.
“We found that not only are humans capable of scent-tracking, but they spontaneously mimic the tracking pattern of mammals.
“One notable difference between these results and those from dogs is that dogs sniff much faster, which may partially account for their greater scent-tracking proficiency. ”
The study looked at the advantages of having two nostrils, which although prevalent amongst mammals, were thought to be too close together to provide more information than just a single nostril.
Using imaging technology to check the stream of air entering the nostrils, it found the nose aerodynamics fed each nostril from completely separate parts of the air.
The right nostril could inhale air from up to 2cm to the right, and the left from up to 1.5cm in the opposite direction.
Mr Sobel said: “Considering that the boundary of a scent plume can be 10mm, this result demonstrated that one nostril can be within a plume, while the other is out of the plume.”
To see how this was used, used 14 volunteers to perform the scent-tracking task twice. Once with both nostrils open, and the other with one blocked.
Compared to dual-nostril tracking, where two-thirds of the volunteers successfully followed the trail, just a third could complete it using just one nostril.
Mr Sobel added: “Our results suggest that there was an added benefit to simultaneous sampling at the spatially offset locations provided by the two nostrils.
“Mechanisms that may subserve this behaviour have been revealed in recent studies indicating that immobile rats and humans require bilateral input to localise odour sources within a single sniff.
“However these past results – obtained in highly artificial settings with immobilised animals – did not show whether such differences were relevant to natural spatial behaviour.
“Here we find that mammals performing a scent-tracking task, freely able to move their nose and sample the environment in real time, reap added benefit from sampling via their two spatially offset nostrils.”
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