Are humans constantly but subconsciously smelling themselves?

Here is the opening of a lengthy abstract of a new paper by Ofer Perl, et.al., and it may help explain why it is so hard to avoid touching your face:

All primates, including humans, engage in self-face-touching at very high frequency. The functional purpose or antecedents of this behaviour remain unclear. In this hybrid review, we put forth the hypothesis that self-face-touching subserves self-smelling. We first review data implying that humans touch their faces at very high frequency. We then detail evidence from the one study that implicated an olfactory origin for this behaviour: This evidence consists of significantly increased nasal inhalation concurrent with self-face-touching, and predictable increases or decreases in self-face-touching as a function of subliminal odourant tainting. Although we speculate that self-smelling through self-face-touching is largely an unconscious act, we note that in addition, humans also consciously smell themselves at high frequency.

File under Questions that are Rarely Asked, via Michelle Dawson.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed