Scent-tracking dogs take such tracking to the extreme, routinely accomplishing remarkable feats in unfamiliar environments and on the trail of unfamiliar people such as missing persons. Something happened, and I need to make a decision. There's changing wind, changing humidity. There are other odors—a deer defecated over here, and over here there's some urine from a rabbit.
And somehow that dog is able to say, 'Yeah, but I'm focusing on little Sally. Such mysteries are the spice for dog researchers. In a study, for instance, Wells and Hepper found that dogs led at right angles to a human-laid trail one hour after the trail was walked identified the correct direction of those trails that had been laid from left to right more frequently than those laid from right to left.
And what of Jones and my friend Burk? When I told Horowitz about my dog's behavior—which always caught me and Burk equally off guard—and I asked why Jones might have done it, she laughed and said, "I cannot tell you. There are some places my science does not go.
Perhaps Burk already smelled pretty fragrantly of something else, she offered. Regardless of why, I said, Burk should have felt honored by such treatment, right? Horowitz laughed again. Support Provided By Learn More. Related Dogs' Dazzling Sense of Smell. Email Address. Zip Code. Share this article. In a recent review article in Science, McGann argues that we've actually outperformed super-sniffers like dogs at certain smelling tasks, and are better at detecting particular aromas that might be important to us.
He also explains exactly how he believes we first convinced ourselves that our sense of smell, well, stinks. According to McGann, our olfactory inferiority is nothing but a year-old myth born of erroneous assumptions and faulty science. The story begins in the brain—specifically the olfactory bulb, the brain's smell-processing center. Located in the forebrain, this bulb is directly connected to the olfactory receptor neurons that line the inside the nose.
These receptors collect information from airborne scent molecules and transmit them up to the brain via the olfactory tract. In the 19th century, neuroanatomist Paul Broca was searching for what he believed made humans special: free will.
Bigger must be better, he surmised. Therefore, Broca deduced that humans' olfactory bulbs—which are small relative to our total brain size—would enable a far weaker sense of smell than the relatively larger ones found in other animals. That theory lacked any analysis of humans' actual olfactory abilities, McGann notes now. But at the time, it stuck: Researchers began to believe that, as humans evolved, the primitive smelling ability of "lower" animals gave way to advanced cognition in the human brain, based on the relative sizes of these regions.
In fact, McGann writes, studies have found little evidence to suggest that olfactory bulb size predicts smelling ability. Bigger animals might need larger brains to control more muscles or process more sensory information, he explains.
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May May 5. In studies, dogs have been placed on paths that perpendicularly intersect those of a human. Once they cross the human path, dogs are able to discern the direction that the human took by evaluating the strength of the human scent along the trail. If you think that you can mask your true feelings from your dog, think again. On walks through your neighborhood, your dog may wander at a painfully slow pace, drag you across the street, or spend agonizing minutes smelling a tree or bush while you grow ever late for work.
To our blunt sense of smell, this is a painful waste of time, but the dogs are gathering an enormous amount of information from other dogs and other animals in the area.
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