“Smell is a surprisingly powerful sense in these situations. People who lose their sense of smell suffer greater emotional deterioration than people who lose their vision. That’s because smell is a powerful way to read emotions. In one experiment conducted at Monell Center, researchers asked men and women to tape gauze pads under their arms and then watch either a horror movie or a comedy. Research subjects…then sniffed the pads. They could somehow tell, at rates higher than chance, which pads had the smell of laughter and which pads had the smell of fear, and women were much better at this test than men.”
-David Brooks The Social Animal
