New science has shown that women have better sense of smell than men due to brain chemistry differences, the Daily Mail reported on Wednesday.
According to the study, men and women perceive odors differently, with women doing better than men on many different smell tests.
Sex differences in olfactory detection may be important in differences in social behaviors and could be linked to sense of smell, which in all humans is connected to emotion. This information led researchers to believe that women's superior sense of smell was mental and emotional, instead of purely perceptual.
Roberto Lent, a professor at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at Rio de Janeiro's Federal University, and his colleagues then examined the post-mortem brains of seven men and 11 women who were healthy and over the age of 55 when they died. None of the jobs they held required having a special sense of smell, Medical News Today reported.
The scientists counted the number of cells in the olfactory bulbs in each brain and found that women had 43 percent more cells in their brain on average than men. When only neurons were counted, that number went up to 50 percent.
"Generally speaking, larger brains with larger numbers of neurons correlate with the functional complexity provided by these brains. Thus, it makes sense to think that more neurons in the female olfactory bulbs would provide women with higher olfactory sensitivity," Lent said.
Since human brains to not acquire more cells as we grow, it may mean that women are born with extra olfactory cells. Another theory is that women have a superior sense of smell to help select potential mates.
