The human sense of smell is much quicker than previously thought.
The human sense of smell is very fast
Scientists have long suspected that olfactory is sluggish but new evidence has found that the nose can detect chemical changes in the duration of just a single sniff.
Researchers at the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a unique sniff-triggered device that controlled the delivery of a range of different smells and tested 229 participants who could tell the differences between scents in just 0.06 seconds - 10 times as fast as previously thought.
The speed is about a third of the time it takes someone to blink and is similar to how quickly humans perceive different colours.
Study author Dr. Wen Zhou said: "Our findings demonstrate that human olfactory perception is sensitive to chemical dynamics within a single sniff and provide behavioural evidence for a temporal (time) code to odour identity."