Ed Yong
speaker
354 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 25 Sep
Ed Yong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm not going to tell you that our sense of smell is as good as, say, an elephant's or a dog's.
They have hardware that we don't have.
Humans really aren't too bad at it.
We have decent noses.
We can smell a lot of different kinds of chemicals.
We can detect some of them at concentrations that rival championship sniffers like Doc.
Yes, so I went to see a woman named Alexandra Horowitz who studies dogs, dog cognition, a dog's sense of smell.
She got a length of string that had been scented with chocolate and she laid it on the floor and my task was to, with a blindfold on, follow the path of the string.
So I got down in all fours
And I sniffed at the string and I did basically what a dog does, which is to swing your head left and right while you're sniffing.
And by doing this, you can follow the path of the string.
And I did.
But two things.
First, it took a long time.
And second, I was hyperventilating as I was doing it because I am not like we are not used to just going...
Right.
Because the way our noses work, every time you blow, every time you exhale, you lose that perception of whatever you're smelling.
So you have to just repeatedly, if you're doing that many times in a row, you start.
It's not good.
So dogs can do it for a bunch of different reasons.
Showing 21–40 of 354 · page 2 of 18
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