For millennia, the sense of smell has been widely undervalued — ranked far below vision by the likes of Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud. In 2021, a survey in the journal Brain Sciences found that people consistently ranked smell below vision and hearing — and even below commercial products. One quarter of college students surveyed said they’d prefer to give up their sense of smell than their smartphones.
But modern research suggests that smell, also known as olfaction, is less dispensable than we might think. In recent decades, we’ve gained a greater understanding of just how much humans rely on the sense of smell — for everything from social communication to the detection of environmental hazards. Researchers even believe that changes in patients’ sense of smell could eventually be used to diagnose neurodegenerative diseases.
As the science of smell continues to progress, it’s becoming increasingly clear how much we stand to gain by focusing on it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In 2021, a survey in the journal Brain Sciences found that people consistently ranked smell below vision and hearing — and even below commercial products.
In recent decades, we’ve gained a greater understanding of just how much humans rely on the sense of smell — for everything from social communication to the detection of environmental hazards.
It’s a sensitivity that would have made evolutionary sense for our foraging ancestors as they sought food, helping them to discern the smell of overripe fruit.
In 2015 a study from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science found that after a handshake, people consistently brought their own hand to their nose — subconsciously smelling each other.
While the loss of smell emerged as a possible symptom of COVID-19 as early as March 2020, it took months for governments to add it to their screening guidelines for the virus — even after researchers flagged it as one of the most accurate indicators of infection.
A recent study published in the academic journal Life suggests that at least seven per cent of those who lost their sense of smell to COVID-19 have never fully recovered it.
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