Page 24 - The Miracles of Smell and Taste
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thing, from the Earth to the skies, with its perfection of design:
. . . Everything in the heavens and Earth belongs to Him. Everything is
obedient to Him, the Originator of the heavens and Earth. When He
decides on something, He just says to it, ‘Be!’ And it is. (Surat al-
Baqara: 116- 7)
The Nose’s Chemical Analysis Facility
5
You breathe an average of 23,040 times each day. During this con-
stantly repeated process, your nose adapts air for the lungs in the most
appropriate manner. In doing so, it performs
another very important task: It detects and Olfactory bulb Olfactory
mucosa
monitors odors. (Figure 3)
The total population of a sniff is a billion
trillion molecules, nearly all of them normally
6
in the mix we call air. The scent particles, far
too small to be seen with the naked eye, are Air drawn into
the nose
contained within this enormous quantity of
molecules. After you have breathed in, special
turbinate bones in the nose direct a portion of
that air to the scent-perceiving region. In this
way, scent molecules arrive at a region in the
upper part of the nasal cavity, some 7 centime- Normal
inhalation
ters (2.756 inches) inside and above the nos-
(Figure 3)
We breathe in and out through our noses all
day long. Our noses adapt the air that enters
it to the lungs in the finest way and direct part Normal
of that air to the olfactory region, and thus we exhalation
perceive smells at the same time.
The Miracles of Smell and
Taste