Compared to the brains of other mammals, the primate olfactory cortex has decreased in size and relative importance over the course of evolution, being outranked in functional priority by the visual system.
We have noses for a reason
In fact, for many reasons, a sizeable proportion of which involves gathering useful information from the environment in the form of pheromone.
Other people’s apocrine glands—that is to say, their armpits—are routinely piping out a lot of important social information.
These armpit odor molecules are sucked up into our sinuses, processed by our brains, and translated into some rather interesting psychological and behavioral reactions.
