How Many Smells Can You Smell?
How do we smell? Great! Thanks for asking! Subscribe to It's Okay To Be Smart: http://bit.ly/iotbs_sub ↓ More info and sources below ↓ Follow on Twitter: ...
==========
[MUSIC] The sense of smell is probably nature’s oldest. We can trace its odoriferous origins back to the single-celled organisms who sampled Earth’s most primordial perfumes. Humans depend mostly on sight and sound to navigate our world, but on every step of that journey we are led by our noses. Literally, because it’s on the front of your face. [MUSIC] Our eyes and ears can be fooled by illusions or noise, but not our noses. And compared to the spectrum of smell, our tastebuds are crude, like looking at Van Gogh on an Atari. Of the human genome’s 20,000 or so genes, almost a thousand code for olfactory receptors. Those genes have duplicated and specialized throughout our aromatic evolution, and they're found on all but two of your chromosomes. Being the eyeball-dependent ap...
==========
[MUSIC] The sense of smell is probably nature’s oldest. We can trace its odoriferous origins back to the single-celled organisms who sampled Earth’s most primordial perfumes. Humans depend mostly on sight and sound to navigate our world, but on every step of that journey we are led by our noses. Literally, because it’s on the front of your face. [MUSIC] Our eyes and ears can be fooled by illusions or noise, but not our noses. And compared to the spectrum of smell, our tastebuds are crude, like looking at Van Gogh on an Atari. Of the human genome’s 20,000 or so genes, almost a thousand code for olfactory receptors. Those genes have duplicated and specialized throughout our aromatic evolution, and they're found on all but two of your chromosomes. Being the eyeball-dependent ap...
