Exploring the world using the sense of smell

Irmina Wojciechowska, Aleksandra Wojciechowska, Karolina Wieszczycka It is hard to imagine a world without smells. It’s not just about the inability to enjoy the aromas of freshly ground coffee, English roses or the earth after rain. Impairment of the sense of smell, called anosmia, affects even as much as 6% of human population and leads not just to the impoverishment of smell sensations, but also to the disturbance of taste perception and... recognizing emotions (Croy et al., 2014). The goal of this paper is share basic information about aroma compounds. In this article, you will find information on how the human body copes with smells and how the chemical structures of aroma compounds influence the type of smell sensation. We will hereby present and illustrate differences in the chemical structure of some organic compounds that may seem to be irrelevant, but actually influence their properties in a significant way. The sense of smell is one of the most primitive ways of perceiving the surrounding world. This may be associated with predators hunting for their prey and may seem to be insignificant for modern humans. Nothing could be more wrong! Smell is associated with a human being from the first moments of our lives. The smell of a mother’s body is one of the first recognized by an infant, and so is the smell of food and the baby’s environment. This is actually a period of life when odors start to play an important role in creating memories and emotions, which is attributed to the proximity of the olfactory system and the limbic system in the human brain. Each of us can name at least a few smells that connote good – or to the contrary, bring up bad – memories. Sometimes a single smell can suddenly recall completely forgotten emotions and memories. Research conducted on a group of volunteers confirm the hypothesis that the sense of smell serves as a communication channel between people – in this original way, we can sense each other’s fear, dismay or disgust and the alarm of others in our area about a serious threat (De Groot et al., 2012). In 2004, the Noble Price was awarded to Linda B. Buck and Richard Alex for their research, which proved that as much as 2% of the human genome is involved in coding smell receptors, also known as odorant receptors, over Summary: