BCS 151 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Olfactory Epithelium, Nasal Cycle, Nostril
4 Dec 2016
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We live in an ocean of odors produced by everything imaginable. Must be volatile (floats into the air for us to smell) We only smell what we have receptors for. Smelling and breathing go hand-in-hand: when we stop smelling things, we would have stopped breathing, being inhaled through the nose, through the mouth (vapors circulate up through throat) Sniffing what we do to consciously detect odors. Heated things: the molecules are more excited and escape to the air more: more vapors are given off when an odorant is heated. Gravity and air currents are necessary for distribution of volatile substances: odors spread more readily when there is moisture, odors are dispersed more rapidly at higher altitudes. Smelling in water: e. g. the star-nosed mole blows bubbles to capture smells in the air. We don"t seem to have a lot of words to describe smells; words for only the bad ones. Odors act mainly as warnings (e. g. smoke, gas leaking, disease)
