Page 38 - The Miracles of Smell and Taste

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Wonderful Messengers: Scent Cells

Scent receptors are actually nerve cells whose main function is to car-
ry to the olfactory bulb the messages triggered by scent molecules. Views
in the scientific world differ as to their numbers. Some researchers put the
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figure at 10 million , and others at around 50 million. Millions of scent
cells in the olfactory region—which is no larger than the smallest postage
stamp—are arranged in an astonishing regularity. If you possessed all
technical means and were asked to place millions of cells in exactly the
right locations, could you do it? Such a task would of course be impossi-
ble. After all their years of research, scientists have been unable even to
determine the exact number of cells, let alone set out millions of them,

showing that this task is of course impossible.
Within the scent cell itself, there is also a striking division of labor. As
the well-known researcher Stuart Firestein points out: “The olfactory sys-
tem accomplishes its sensory tasks with biological mechanisms that are

Smell
Sight Taste Touch
Hearing

Meissner
corpuscle

Rod Cone Free nerve endings

(Figure 7)
Some cells in the sensory systems. As we can see, each sense cell has a
special design.

The Miracles of Smell and
Taste