Who would not want a “Spidey feeling” that would perceive danger lurking just around the country and avoid it at the right time, which is not limited to smelling gas leaks or burnt food. It seems that nature has already given us the strong smell, but we have taken it for granted all the time. An interesting study by a Swedish institute has found that we can literally smell the danger!

The research carried out by Karolinska Institutet in Sweden indicates that the nerves inside the nose can send a message to our brain within milliseconds that something smells fishy.

The study was conducted on two groups of participating non-smokers. The first group got the smell of perfume of linalool or fruity smelling ethyl butyrate and then diethyl disulfide which has a yellowish smell and their brain waves were examined. Both the fast-processing gamma waves formed by attention and memory and beta waves generated to make decisions and considerations were monitored.

The other group with 21 volunteers also got to smell nice and not-so-nice smell and their physical reactions were studied.

The researchers noticed that the brain considered an odor a threat and a message was sent to the motor brain of our brain within 150 milliseconds to take the necessary action. Gamma and beta waves were seen ‘connect’ to coordinate to send an alert to the brain.

The reactions that the signals trigger jerk the head away from the smell, stop to inhale and blow.

The results of the study, which was published in the journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’, find that the ability to detect and respond to the smell of a potential threat is a prerequisite for our and other mammals’ survival.

The study further states that the olfactory organ occupies five percent of the human brain and allows them to distinguish between millions of different scents. A large proportion of them are associated with threats to survival. Odor signals reach the brain within 100 to 150 milliseconds after inhalation.