"To imagine the scent-based world of a dog, says Horowitz, look around and imagine that everything you see has its own individual scent. And not just each object - different parts of the same object may hold different types of information. Horowitz gives the example of a rose: each petal might have a different scent, telling the dog it has been visited by different insects that left telltale traces of pollen from other flowers. Besides picking up on the individual scent of humans that had touched the flower, it could even guess when they may have passed by.
Unfortunately there's no way for a mere human to get inside this highly detailed world. Even if we get down on the ground and sniff, we cannot do it like a dog. When we sniff we are sporadically blind to scent as we breathe in and out through the same holes. A 2009 study of the fluid dynamics of the dog's sniff showed that their system is far more complex. Each nostril is smaller than the distance between the two, which means that they inhale air from two distinct regions of space, allowing the dog to decipher the direction of a scent. The sniff also funnels stale air out through the sides of the nostrils, an action which pulls new air into the nose. Once inside the nose the air swirls around up to 300 million olfactory receptors, compared with our measly 6 million (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, vol 7, p 933).
Even if humans could gather this information, our brains wouldn't know what to do with it: the dog olfactory cortex, which processes scent information, takes up 12.5 per cent of their total brain mass, while ours accounts for less than 1 per cent.
- Alexander Horowtiz, author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
Unfortunately there's no way for a mere human to get inside this highly detailed world. Even if we get down on the ground and sniff, we cannot do it like a dog. When we sniff we are sporadically blind to scent as we breathe in and out through the same holes. A 2009 study of the fluid dynamics of the dog's sniff showed that their system is far more complex. Each nostril is smaller than the distance between the two, which means that they inhale air from two distinct regions of space, allowing the dog to decipher the direction of a scent. The sniff also funnels stale air out through the sides of the nostrils, an action which pulls new air into the nose. Once inside the nose the air swirls around up to 300 million olfactory receptors, compared with our measly 6 million (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, vol 7, p 933).
Even if humans could gather this information, our brains wouldn't know what to do with it: the dog olfactory cortex, which processes scent information, takes up 12.5 per cent of their total brain mass, while ours accounts for less than 1 per cent.
- Alexander Horowtiz, author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
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