Chapter 8: Making Scents

This chapter was short and it was easy to understand. I learned a lot about how our sense of smell works. The picture on page 142 (the one with the person smelling the flower) helped me really see how the molecules work their way into our nose so that we can detect its odor. I also really liked how he used the analogy of the chord. A chord contains many different notes that essentially act as one. "In the same way, an odor is the product of signals from lots of receptors keyed to different odor molecules. Our brain perceives these different impulses as one smell" (141-142). This helped me understand how our sense of smell works. I also learned that humans have many useless genes for smell because we traded off for having sight. I found that interesting as well.

- Nirav Patel