Wednesday, October 22, 2008

What If We Could See With Our Nose?

The other day I was talking to a friend and we were discussing how it is kind of amazing how our eyes work. Or maybe I should say our eyes/brain. From a relatively simplistic point of view, light bounces off things around us, goes into our eyes, get translated into electrical impulses that travel to our brains. Our brains take those electrical impulses and creates our vision. We see what the light brings to our brains. We see objects, color, depth, and movement among other things.

Our eyesight is much better than dogs. They are pretty good at movement, but not so good at the actual object. Dogs have a much better sense of smell than we do. Much much better. So we began to wonder if dogs "see" with their noses like we see with our eyes. Are they able to create a mental image of what they smell? Can they distinguish different, but very similar objects by smell like we do by color?

Taken a step further, if we could develop a sense of smell like a dogs, would it change the way we perceive the world around us? We would see and smell an object in great detail. How would that change our perception of things.

Maybe we would become great bullshit meters! That would be useful around election time.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting point! I wonder what bullshit would smell like? Probably not fruity or flowery. lol

    If we had that strong of a sense of smell, I would hope we wouldn't have sensitivity of sorts to get ill over smells of objects. :D

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  2. Well, you know the first place dogs smell on each other. It doesn't seem to make them ill, so...

    It sure would look funny if we smelled each others butts, instead of hugging or shaking hands when we meet.

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