Squeeze and Smell

When you squeeze one of the bottles, it releases a puff of air that contains scent molecules from the substance inside the bottle. Some of these molecules enter your nasal cavity together with the air, where they dissolve and turn into a thin mucus so that they can be more easily taken up by the receptors in your nose. Inside the nasal cavity, there are lots of receptor cells with hairs that the mucus sticks to. The scent signals then pass through the olfactory nerve and the olfactory bulb, which is at the very end of the olfactory nerve, to the brain. This is where our impression of the scent is formed. The right side of the brain is the most active when it comes to smelling, but the left side is activated when we encounter a smell that we find unpleasant. The left side of the brain is used for rational thinking, and in this case it is used to determine if what we are smelling is dangerous. Something that we maybe need to protect ourselves from. Humans can detect around 10,000 different scents.