THE OLFACTORY SENSE
The five senses – sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch enable us to experience life in different ways and would seem to play roles of equal importance as means of making contact with material life.
However, as individuals we have developed each sense to serve us with differing degrees of development. It is common that many of us would claim the sense of taste, for instance as more important to us than the sense of olfaction and many of us certainly tend to exercise it more than our sense of smell!
Human sense of smell is generally limited compared with the extremely acute sense in animals. Although it plays an important role in our lives in helping us discriminate in judging quality of things, we are not faced with self preservation or hunting for food as the animal but rather have developed our olfaction as a tool for our sensory enjoyment.
Yet our perception of perfume varies enormously. Some people have a fine perception of a wide range of perfumes from unpleasant to exquisite and others are limited, not only in registering a range of scents but in their ability to enjoy them. The most masterly development of the sense of olfaction is known in the perfume industry where specialist perfumers are known to be capable of distinguishing up to 700-2000 different perfumes – compared with an “average” range of about 200.
Our first interest is usually to extend our perception and this offers a fascinating exercise in becoming familiar with, and learning to identify the perfumes of essential oils.
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