It occurs to me that scent is probably the most powerful of the five basic**1** senses animals possess.

Granted, it can vary from person to person and from species to species. My sense of taste is not as refined as that of a professional chef, but I am the only person in my immediate family who doesn't need glasses.

My thoughts are on the capabilities of the senses themselves.

Sight requires light. In the dark, sight is useless. Sight only provides a 2-dimensional snapshot of the world. Binocular vision and parallax gives us the illusion of depth and 3-dimensions but won't tell us about the past or future. And you won't be able to see an object behind something opaque.

Hearing requires vibration. I can close my eyes and hear noises throughout the house, traffic down the road. It is also temporary. If I drop a glass you can hear the crash as it hits the floor. And then you hear nothing else. Sight would still show you the shards of glass on the floor.

Touch is limited to contact with our skin. My eyes can detect a cat at the end of the street and my ears can hear a chained up dog bark at that cat, but my sense of touch would be aware of none of this.

Taste is much like touch, but even more restricted. Candy may be delicious, but not if my tongue isn't licking it.

Scent. Smell is like touch but everything comes to you. People and most things emit molecules that take a long time to dissipate. Scent lets you detect through time. My roommate comes home. Sight shows my car in the driveway. He opens the front door. His ears hear music coming from my room. His nose however, immediately tells him that I had garlic butter dipping sauce. Yesterday. I could show you a photo of two pairs of shorts. You'd never guess which I'd worn to the gym three days in a row and which one just came out of the dryer. If I handed them to you in person, trust me, you'd know.

It is silly that when comic book writers give a super-hero enhanced senses (such as Superman or Daredevil), they focus on sight or hearing, or even touch, but neglect the benefits of using their nose2.

Imagine if Superman's sense of smell was as developed as his supervision or superhearing?
"Hmm, Jimmy got lucky in the janitor's closet. The scent of sex, her perfume and industrial strength bleach really stand out."
"The Flash had White Castle for lunch three days ago."
"The man who broke into this bank vault uses strawberry shampoo, cheap aftershave and drinks lots of bourbon. So even though he wore a ski mask, I can quickly stake out bars and eliminate anyone who is bald or has a full beard."
"It's that time of the month for Lois again. I think I'll crash at the Batcave with Bruce for the next three days. Good thing I can fly cause spending every night running around Gotham in the same costume means his Batmobile smells like a gym locker."

There are exceptions, of course, but usually for feral characters like Wolverine and then only if the current writer remembers.

Alan Davis had a story where Wolverine realized his female companion wasn't human when he realized he couldn't smell her, but could tell the cave they were investigating was used by a bear several years before.

In Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick, Belkar Bitterleaf (halfling ranger) was able to tell when one of his companions was replaced by his evil twin bother, by scent alone.

And from Wolf (1994), "Gary? Uh, don't tell people that you had a drop of tequila with your coffee this morning. You didn't have coffee this morning."

Consider how different human lives would be if we had a greater sense of smell. Secrets would be harder to keep. Food might taste better. We'd probably tolerate pollution and garbage a lot less. We might follow the example set by dogs and drive with our car windows rolled down more often. And our use of perfumes and deodorants? Would we use more? Less? Find different scents more alluring?

1I use this modifier to exclude what some might call lesser senses such as a sense of time, or temperature, or detecting magnetic north; or paranormal senses like clairvoyance and precognition.

[x-posted to LJ and dA]