Smelling test: children need education in sniffing aromas, scientist says

‘I would love a world where at primary and secondary school people are taught to engage their noses,’ Tullett said. Clair/ View image in fullscreen ‘I would love a world where at primary and secondary school people are taught to engage their noses,’ Tullett said. Clair/ Smelling test: children need education in sniffing aromas, scientist says Exclusive: Dr Will Tullett says better understanding of scents can improve wellbeing and perception of the world Children need a better education in sniffing aromas, a leading historian of smells has said, noting it may improve their wellbeing and help them understand the world around them. Dr Will Tullett, of the University of York, said pollution had been found to impair people’s olfactory abilities, while many objects and substances today – from margarines to car interiors and even our own homes – were stripped of their original smells and “reodourised” with synthetic scents. “There is an open question about what the proliferation of those kinds of synthetic scents in our daily lives does to our ability to discriminate between different smells,” he said. As a result, Tullett said, there was a need for olfactory education. “I would love a world where at primary and secondary school people are taught to engage their noses,” he said, adding that training could also be done at home. He said one approach would be to encourage people to smell more items. “The more we smell, the more we enlarge the vocabulary through which we can describe other things,” he said, noting that sommeliers took a similar approach. “They’ll go to marketplaces and they’ll walk around and they’ll smell everything. And then what they’re doing is expanding their range of reference points. And then I think it’s being able to compare and contrast and think about what are the similarities between different smells.” Tullett said thinking about smells could also help us to understand ourselves, such as why we find some odours comforting, and could provide useful information about the world. “A classic example here is food safety and food sustainability – smelling as to whether something is fresh or not and whether you need to bin it, rather than relying solely on a use by date, for example,” he said. It’s just that they’re not necessarily given the opportunity, or equipped with the language, or even given a sense of confidence that they can talk about it,” he said.