We smell better when we stand up
Published: February 3, 2006
A surprising discovery about how humans perceive odours has researchers putting a new twist on an old adage: if you’re going to stop and smell the roses, don’t do it lying down.
Researchers in Montreal have determined that most people’s noses appear to pick up scents better when they are sitting or standing compared to when they’re reclining.
And that could have all sorts of implications, they say, from how to get the most bang for the buck when presenting flowers to a beloved (think Valentine’s Day) to the ability to notice that dinner is burning on the stove after getting horizontal to watch TV.
“What we found was there actually was a difference in sensitivity sitting up compared to lying down,” said Johan Lundström, a post-doctoral researcher at the Montreal Neurological Institute.
Scientists at the McGill University institute tested 36 healthy men and women for their responses to 16 increasingly strong concentrations of phenyl ethyl alcohol, a chemical that smells like roses.
Each subject had the odour wafted under their nostrils both while sitting up and lying down.
It turns out that most (64 per cent) could “smell the roses” much better when upright in a chair; they needed a higher, more odorous concentration to detect the scent when on their backs, Lundström, lead author of the study, said yesterday from Montreal.
Previous studies have shown that being supine can reduce other senses connected to the brain, including hearing and spatial perception. But the Montreal study is the first to find a link between position and sense of smell, said neuropsychologist Marilyn Jones-Gotman, head of the institute’s chemical senses laboratory and the study’s principal investigator.
Theories abound as to why our sense of smell drops when we’re lying down.
But Lundström theorizes that it might be part of a “sleep-preparedness mechanism.”
“When we lie down, we may be shutting down the olfactory sense,” he said. “It could be that we don’t have as much need for it. If all our senses were going up, we might not be able to go to sleep.”
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