A German Shephard has 225 million scent receptors while a human has only 5 million. The percent of a dog’s brain devoted to analyzing smells is 40 times larger than that of a human. It is estimated that dogs can smell somewhere between 1,000 to 10,ooo times better than humans.
When I come home from work, my dog sniffs me up and down to gather information of where I have been. Ah, his noble brilliant nose. But there is a sad side to this special skill. Each morning from when I wake until I walk out the door to get in my car, my dog does not sniff me once. But as soon as I start to climb into my car, my dog goes crazy sniffing me. It was as if he was asking “Were are you going?” But alas, his sniffing is pointless. I have no odors on me to help him see where I am heading. His supreme sniff becomes a pathetic dead-end for him. But we can’t blame him, it is all he has, so he uses it.
When I saw this, I instantly saw a parallel between my dog’s desperate sniffs and human thought. We use our limited treasure chests of cognitive tools to search for meaning in things when our treasure chests are actually fairly empty. I will not mention any group of people in particular — for I think we are all guilty of this, much like my innocent dog — it is our nature !
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