When we smell flowers, it’s because of our body’s reactions to them.
This is true whether we’re looking at a fragrant rose, a sweet or a bitter one.
But, of course, the flowers themselves are also what makes us smell the aroma of them, as we’re able to recognise how a scent can affect our health.
We can’t smell the flowers, so we can’t taste them, but we do know what they smell like.
And it’s these scenting flowers that make up our smell.
It turns out that the same scenting flower we detect as a flower is also the most abundant and most important scenting source for our smell receptors.
The smell of the flowers has a strong effect on the way our body reacts to them, and the researchers from The Ohio State University (OSU) and the University of Michigan (UM) say that this effect can be reversed.
In their paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers show that when people taste the scent of a flower, the smell of that flower is stronger than that of the same flower that they had not smelled before.
The researchers also found that the stronger the scent, the stronger was the responses from the body’s nose to that scent.
These changes in smell have important health implications.
For instance, the scenting effect can increase our chance of getting cancer and obesity.
This could have a knock-on effect on our ability to fight cancer, too.
The study also showed that the effect was most pronounced in older people.
People aged 70 to 75 had stronger reactions to odours they had previously smelled than those of younger people, suggesting that the longer they were living in the community, the more likely they were to have developed the same problem.
This suggests that the scent is important for health, but the mechanisms behind how it works are still unknown.
“I think that our smell is the ultimate, best smell,” says study author Eileen McLean, who led the research.
“When we smell a flower we don’t smell a lot of chemicals, but when we smell the smell in the flower, we smell all of the chemicals in that flower.”
The researchers say their study suggests that, like the taste of food, our smell has a long-term impact on how we feel.
They also say that there may be some clues that might help us to understand how the scent works.
The scenting effects can help us understand how we smell, and we can then understand the smell we feel, explains McLean.
McLean and her colleagues say that the results could help researchers understand how our bodies perceive odours, how our senses work, and how we respond to odour cues.
The team says that future research could help improve our understanding of the effects of smell on our sense of smell and smell perception.
The OSU study is published in Proceedings of a National Academy: Biological Sciences.
For more information, visit: http://www.pnas.org/content/104/7/1273.full
