Sense of smell can actually help with sense of direction

Author: Ned Dymoke / Source: Big Think

It has to do with two parts of the brain, both of which are thicker in those with better smell and spacial recognition.
Your nose can detect about 1 trillion smells.
While your nose isn’t a full GPS, it can help you pick out a general direction.

Smell is a funny thing.

Some people — — have no sense of smell at all. This might seem like a good thing until you realize just how important smell is to not only your sense of taste but your sense of memory, too. Turns out that a keen sense of smell is also good for something else: your sense of direction.

Louisa Dahmani, Raihaan M. Patel, Yiling Yang, M. Mallar Chakravarty, Lesley K. Fellows, Véronique D. Bohbot

NATURE Magazine

According to a study done by McGill University out of Montreal, and recently published recently in Nature, your sense of smell and your sense of direction are actually linked. It had been thought they were before (the ‘olfactory spatial hypothesis’ goes back to at least 1971), but no conclusive study had been done until now.

57 participants were asked to navigate a virtual town. They were given 20 minutes to familiarize themselves with it, and then quizzed on how to get from one virtual landmark to another.