

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Body" by Bill Bryson. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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How does smell affect taste? How good is a human’s sense of smell?
The sense of smell plays a significant role in its taste. According to Bill Bryson, the author of The Body, the sense of smell is actually more important than taste, which can be an obstacle to weight loss.
Here’s why you shouldn’t underestimate the power of smell.
Recognize the Power of Your Sense of Smell
In his book The Body, Bryson discusses how we perceive what we eat. He explains that flavor is actually a mental construct that your brain assembles from a variety of sensory inputs, not just taste. So, how does smell affect taste? The smell of food actually has a greater influence on how you perceive its flavor than its taste does, perhaps because your sense of smell is more refined than your sense of taste: Your body only has about five types of taste receptors, but it has roughly 400 types of smell receptors.
To illustrate the sensitivity of human smell, Bryson recounts an experiment where researchers dragged various scented objects, such as a piece of chocolate, across an athletic field. Then they asked students to follow the scent trail on their hands and knees, sniffing the grass. Most of the participants succeeded in following the scent trail accurately. Many of them even outperformed dogs at following scent trails.
(Shortform note: A different study measured how sensitive humans and various animals were to different scents. They found that the human sense of smell was as good or better than that of most animals, even those noted for their keen sense of smell. In fact, humans’ sense of smell was more sensitive in 76% of their tests.)

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Here's what you'll find in our full The Body summary :
- A whirlwind tour of the human body’s various systems
- Why your sense of smell is probably as good as your dog’s
- How hot peppers increase your life expectancy