Monday, October 14th

Everybody should go find the nearest jar of peanut butter and take a smell.

I was reading all these fun and interesting science things on the PopScience website when i stumbled upon a very interesting article. Apparently, simply being able to smell peanut butter through your left nostril is a way for you to detect if you are increasingly prone to have Alzheimer's decease.

Sounds crazy right? Well, apparently this is due to the way the nerve endings in your brain work. According to data from the University of Florida "The ability to smell is associated with the first cranial nerve and is often one of the first things to be affected in cognitive decline." Strangely, Alzheimer's patients have their smell affected in many ways. While this isn't something that is normally the first thought when people discuss the disease it can play a major role in detection. Even stranger the left nostril is impaired much more than the right is.

The experiment was done by measuring the distance from the peanut butter the patient could be while still being able to detect the odor. Apparently, in Alzheimer patients the peanut butter had to be 10 centimeters closer to the nose when smelling through the left nostril than through the right.

Normally our sense of smell uses to different sensations when detecting odors. The first (kinda obviously) is smell while the other is a trigeminal sense. The best description of this is that burning or stinging sensation you get when you smell certain scents. Peanut butter is detected purely as a smell through the nose, without any of the other trigeminal sense.

The fact that scientists were able to discover this is purely amazing and the fact that it is such a cheap and a little bit silly sounding at first is just a bonus.

Nosowitz, Dan. "If You Can Smell This, You May Not Have Alzheimer's." Popular Science. N.p., 09 Oct. 2013. Web. 14 Oct. 2013.