Contrary to common belief, smell is a more encompassing sense than either sight or hearing.

Olfaction can be fine-tuned through exercising it.

Most of us would feel pressed if someone asked us to come up with a word or phrase to describe our favorite perfume or cologne. For one reason, most of us pay little attention to smell and therefore have a stunted vocabulary when it comes to describing an odorant (an inorganic compound that produces a distinct smell or aroma).

Our perception of our immediate surroundings is mostly determined by what we see, hear, and touch. Each of the receptors responsible for these sensations exists in specialized organs (retina at the back of the eye for vision; inner ear-cochlea for hearing; touch receptors on the boundaries of our skin). Vision is our dominant sensation thanks to its high resolution, vividness, and immersiveness. Sound follows as a close second. In most cases, we can determine by a form of echolocation where a sound is coming from.

Smell operates quite differently from sight, hearing, or touch. For one thing, we do not experience smell as closely confined to a discrete location. Rather, smells seem to diffuse throughout our environment. This non-locality is quite different from vision; when we look at something, photons travel in straight lines, striking the retina and generating electrical signals in the nerve bundles projecting eventually to the visual area of the occipital lobes (towards the rear of the brain). Sound also projects to specialized receptors from the inner ear to the cochlea and finally terminates in the peritemporal and........

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