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A quick diagram to point out to people who may not know what Eustachian tubes are (#2). In order for the aromatic molecule to reach the olfactory bulb, it would first have to get through the Tympanic Membrane (#22) [a.k.a. - Eardrum]. The Tympanic Membrane is water/airtight unless pierced. So, while it's plausible that an aromatic molecule could travel ...

There are only three kinds of optical receptors in the eye, but more than 900 kinds of olfactory receptors. Thus you can encode pictures with the three primary colors, but there is no small set of primary scents. To transmit a smell via "primary scents", you'd have to create an artificial nose that monitors the response of each of the olfactory receptors, ...

First of all one should tell that one can attribute the activation of certain brain zones with some indepent events only when the activation takes place along the signal input (receptors, sensory pathways towards the cortex and the sensory areas in cortex) or motor action (=output) (along the motox cortex => motor neuron => target organ). Those zones in ...

In expansion to biocs' excellent answer, I would like to highlight some practical limitations of this. Suppose we did manage to create a huge database of exact chemical mixtures which produce all smells recognisable by humans. You would still meet some complications: The output device (analogous to headphones or screen) would either need to be able to ...

@MCM gave a succinct and accurate description of how a healthy and "normal" person will not be able to smell via olfactory sensing trough the Eustachian tube. Here is an interesting concept in which the brain is able to confuse senses, or alternatively, use sensory input as a metaphor for interpretation via another sensory output. This is a condition known ...

This paper finds some species can detect as far as 67 meters, but the range varies between species. Note that the bats can actively change their range of detection and trade off range for resolution (low range with high speed resolution for hunting in closed, cluttered spaces or high range with low speed resolution for hunting in open spaces), as explained ...

In this instance, I would say your attention has been adjusted, not your ear's ability to perceive sound. Our ears don't have a control setting or a means of adjusting incoming sound levels (though I'm certain when an ambulance with loud siren drives by, we all wish we did). What you are experiencing is a prioritization of the sound by your brain in ...

The dog's ability to smell the world around him and to interpret these odors depends on a complicated chemical sensory system. First of all, it possesses mobile nostrils, that help to determine the direction of the smell. Then comes sniffing, the ability to disrupt the air with a regular pattern of breathing that, through laboratory testing, is structured in ...

Any animal using sound cannot sense color though sonar directly, though these animals are not entirely blind and can probably see colors in the infrared we can't. Even on the darkest night there is some light around and all bats use this. Old World fruit bats have colour vision, which is useful to them as they are often quite active in daytime, roosting ...

Shampoo contains surfactants, chemicals which cause lipids to emulsify. The cell membrane is composed primarily of phospholipids, which are vulnerable to action by surfactants. In fact, sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS, often labelled SLS on shampoo bottles), an integral component of many shampoos is also used in the lab (albeit at substantially higher ...

This will be a hypothetical answer for the moment, so take it with a grain of salt until I can find sources or someone else does: My best (educated) guess would be that the smell is there all the time, and when you sneeze you reset what's currently being "ignored" (in that you are not aware of it, though it is being sensed) by your brain momentarily. The ...

In my view, the reason we can't transmit smell is that we don't understand it. That is, we don't have a solid understanding of how odor information is coded, so it is hard to imagine how to build a system that could reproduce that information. This is sometimes discussed in terms of a multi-dimensional "odor space," where each odor could be described by its ...