Berkeley study shows humans as natural scent trackers
Student test subjects put their nose to the ground to find chocolate; after training, results dramatically improved; new discovery holds insight for the explosives detection business
Investors sniffing around for the next big thing should find this interesting. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have found that, contrary to popular belief, human beings can track scents by putting their noses to the ground. In a series of experiments designed to uncover the mechanisms involved in tracking odors, neuroscientist Noam Sobel chose humans over dogs because of their ability to “conduct manipulations such as blocking one of their nostrils, and [we can] make sure that they understand the task we want them to do.” Further, “we wanted to test whether the dual-nostril configuration that humans and other mammals have is utilized in the scent-tracking task.” The result was clear evidence that humans share many of the scenting capacities of their canine friends, including the ability to improve with practice.
In the first experiment, thirty-two cooperative students attempted to track a scent of chocolate essential oil through a grassy field. Twenty-one successfully completed the 10-meter-long course of two straightaways and a 45-degree turn. Then the researchers trained four other subjects on the same task, having them track a scent nine times over a two-week period. The trained odor detectors were able to stay closer to the trail without zigzagging wildly around it and finished the course twice as fast in their last attempt as they did the first time around. As the participants began tracking faster, the researchers observed, they also began sniffing faster, presumably to gather information more quickly.
These results are obviously preliminary, but they do offer some food for thought for those in the explosives detection business. It is doubtful that human sniffers would ever displace canine or mechanical methods, but we can envision systems that relied on both, perhaps with trained humans using their own developed sniffing sense to determine whether testing of certain materials would be appropriate.
-read more in Nikhil Swaminathan’s Scientific American report
