Steve Martin, in the movie Roxanne, declares: "It's not the size of a nose that's important. It's what's in it that matters." This holds reality because nose is capable of detecting trillion different odours.
People always thought that human can only differentiate 10,000 odours. The truth was demonstrated by several scientists this year. Each person can smell above 1 trillion odours, whatever his nose size is.
"We debunk this old, made up number of 10,000," said Leslie Vosshall, Rockefeller University's olfaction researcher in New York City. "It gave humans an inferiority complex about our sense of smell," she added.
Nobody had systematically analysed how many odor people can differentiate. A team being led by Vosshall asked 26 women and 26 men to distinguish among pairs of scents made from mixes of 128 odour molecules. Participants easily differentiate scents that shared to the extent of 51% of participant's scent molecules.
The group of Vosshalls computed that an average partaker could differentiate at least 1 trillion smells created from different mixture of 30 scent molecules. Scientists said that good smellers could possibly notice 1 trillion, or more, odour mixtures.
Hearing and sight is significant sense in which people really need to prevent danger and find food. But still, determining foul odour of food, which is already spoiled, also helps people survive for over 200,000 years.
Maybe animals can also smell and differentiate trillions smell, or even more. Though, the studies on odour detection by Vosshall have been made for human approach only.
"Their work confirms that smell is an incredibly rich, variable, and nuanced medium," Avery Gilbert said. "It's why you can dive so deeply into the aroma of a wine when there are only a few ounces in the glass." Avery Gilbert is an olfaction expert and he does not participate in the study.