Dogs may be 'seeing' through smells, says a study

Dogs never cease to surprise us. They seem to read our emotions and be empathetic. Thousands of years with humankind may have made them our best friends, but we have just begun to understand them. A research has now said that dogs may be able to 'see' through their powerful sense of smell.

That dogs sense of smell is much superior to humans is a known fact. Their nose has more than 220 million odour-detecting cels, more than four times than those in humans. This is pretty much known.

But the new research suggests that smell may form much greater part in dog's perception of its surroundings than thought before.

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The researchers scanned brains of 23 domestic dogs with the help of a special MRI. They found that connections between regions of the brain that processed smell and vision were especially strong.

"We've never seen this connection between the nose and the occipital lobe, functionally the visual cortex in dogs, in any species," Cornell University neuroimaging researcher Pip Johnson explains. He was quoted by Cornell Chronicle

"It was really consistent. And size-wise, these tracts were really dramatic compared to what is described in the human olfactory system, more like what you'd see in our visual systems."

What this means is that dogs form spatial awareness, a mental picture of surrounding more using their sense of smell like we do using vision.

This perhaps explains why even blind dogs can play a game of fetch.

The research has been published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

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