This is something big to think about. This isn't something for the squeamish or Germ Freaks, but did you know that smell is obtained through particles of an object floating through the air. Say you have an orange on the table. You can't smell it right away correct? Let's say you take a knife and cut it open, almost immediately you start smelling it. This is because of Aerosolization. Which means that microscopic fragments and droplets of orange are actually distributed throughout the air.
This is where the squeamish may want to turn away!
This same concept is applied to farting. When you fart microscopic fragments of poo are disbursed through the air, when you begin to smell the fart, this is the stage in which the poo fragments have landed in the sensors of your nose, which generally would mean... that yes... poo is in your nose. Which also means, if someone else farted... You would be smelling their poo that landed in your nose.
Mythbusters actually did an episode on this awhile back which turned out to be confirmed. They also read up on where people were saying this Aerosolization occurred during a poop and that if your tooth brush was to be in the open it would get microscopic poo on your tooth brush. This was confirmed as well. They then set out to test if putting the toilet seat down before flushing the poo, would stop it from Aerosolization. This was proved to reduce the amount of poo particles, but was busted, since it did not completely stop it. They even did another test and set a tooth brush in another area of their ware house away from the bathroom and it STILL ended up with poo particles. So... guess that just goes to show that the world is and always will be FULL OF SHIT!
Smell, like taste, is a chemical sense detected by sensory cells called chemoreceptors. When an odorant stimulates the chemoreceptors in the nose that detect smell, they pass on electrical impulses to the brain. The brain then interprets patterns in electrical activity as specific odors and olfactory sensation becomes perception -- something we can recognize as smell. The only other chemical system that can quickly identify, make sense of and memorize new molecules is the immune system.
But smell, more so than any other sense, is also intimately linked to the parts of the brain that process emotion and associative learning. The olfactory bulb in the brain, which sorts sensation into perception, is part of the limbic system a system that includes the amygdala and hippocampus, structures vital to our behavior, mood and memory.
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