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Ombliss22's avatar

In the frequency theory of smell how many octaves can a human detect?

Asked by Ombliss22 (27points) November 17th, 2017
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1 Answer

LostInParadise's avatar

It is not possible to rank smells on a single scale the way we do for sound. There are different combinations of chemicals that can be detected. I suppose we could compare a human’s capabilities against some other animal, like a dog, and taking a dog’s sensitivity as four octaves, express human capability as some fraction of that.

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