Sniff test

There's more to the nose than meets the eye. Swedish psychology professor Jonas Olofsson smells it like it is in a new book.

- PAUL LITTLE

You can't miss it. When it comes to the face, the nose is front and centre, and for some of us a very prominent feature. Yet compared with the hard-working drudge senses of sight and sound, or the refined and vaguely erotic senses of taste and touch, the nose and all the smelling it does has been relegated to an olfactory out land where it works overtime.

Swedish psychology professor Jonas Olofsson, in his new book The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell, has undertaken to restore the nose to its rightful position. It's a real eye-opener.

Olofsson assails the reader with one scientifically sourced and surprising revelation after another: humans smell as well as, if not better than, most animals; coffee has very little flavour; there is a firm link between odour disgust and right-wing political views.

What led him to this fragrant specialty - did he just follow his nose? Not exactly. "I originally wanted to be a historian or some kind of social theorist," says Olofsson, "but I got very fascinated by cognitive science."

In his early days at university, he worked as an assistant in a nursing home, in some cases with people in the early stages of dementia. "And I learnt from one of my professors that the sense of smell might be a bit of a canary in the coal mine for Alzheimer's disease. So I ended up doing my PhD studying that specific topic."

The theory turned out to be correct for some varieties of Alzheimer's.

It was not a crowded field, partly thanks to the ancient Greeks whose big-name thinkers looked down their noses at smell and considered it a baser faculty. "For example, Aristotle said we have a much less keen sense of smell than other animals. And I think that has been a myth that has stuck throughout the ages."