why people can smell of petrol?
Answers
Explanation:
Benzene is added to the gasoline to increase octane levels, which improves engine performance and fuel efficiency. Benzene has a naturally sweet smell that most noses are particularly sensitive to. It's so pungent that the human nose can detect it if there's just 1 part per million in the air that we breathe.
Answer:
The answer requires an understanding of both chemistry and human physiology…and a bit of history. Did you know that high-end prostitutes once used gasoline as perfume? But more on that later. First let's look at human physiology and the way our brains are wired.
One of the effects of inhaling hydrocarbons, for example gasoline, is to suppress the functioning of the nervous system. This numbing effect on the brain’s mesolimbic pathway causes it to give your brain a shot of the pleasure drug dopamine producing the same sort of sensation you get from sex, albeit it, unhappily for gas station owners, to a lesser degree. The effect is temporary, but it is pleasurable and also addictive, which explains why teenagers can become addicted to huffing aerosols and fumes of almost random hydrocarbons.
The effect is enhanced by the way our brains process olfactory sensations. Most of our sensations, say taste, touch, and sight, are received by the nerves and directed to the brain’s thalamus where they are sorted and directed on to frontal cortex where they are then processed before being sent on to other parts of the brain. This processing has the effect of mediating and effectively moderating those sensations.
Not so with smell. Many nerves directly connect your body’s olfactory nodes to your brain’s amygdala and hippocampus. Why is this important? The amygdala is associated with emotions; the hippocampus with memory formation. Thus, more than other sensations, a smell will be associated with emotions and create memories. Moreover, even after a long passage of time, reencountering that smell will bring back those emotions and memories with surprising vividness and intensity.
We have all encountered this. A walk along a lakeshore or the smell of wet earth or that of a French cigarette will bring back vivid memories of time and place from fifty years ago. This is often called the Proust Effect, after the French author Marcel Proust whose childhood memories were evoked by the smell of one of his aunt’s freshly baked Madeleines which he dipped in tea. My wife, who is capable of accurately distinguishing perfumes and identifying the scents and subtle aromatic differences in wine and seasonings, loved the smell of pre-catalyzed gasoline as the smell brought back vivid memories of her of childhood trips to the service station with a loved and indulgent father.
But there is chemistry involved as well. And this explains why many people who do not like the smell of gasoline today, or of strongly aromatic chemicals generally, often note that they remember liking the smell of gasoline as children.
Gasoline is not a single substance. Rather it is a complex cocktail of chemicals. And the term applies to whatever fuel will work in a spark-ignition internal combustion engine. The gasoline of today is very different from that of the 1950s and ‘60s, and that in turn is very different from the motor fuel of the pre-WWI era. The gasoline of the 1950s and ’60s, which many people remember as having a pleasant smell, was made by a rather simple process of fractional distillation of crude oil. Gasoline today, by comparison, is made by a catalyzed cracking process. This has cost and production advantages, as the catalyzed process allows lower quality crude oil to be used as a starting product. Gasoline could be made out of asphalt. But the hydrocarbon mix today is very different today than that produced by distillation. Moreover, that mix will vary depending upon the refinery, and the region of the country, and the season. And to that mix will be added lubricants, and cleaners, and rust inhibiting agents, and octane enhancers, and even ethanol. Thus, the aromatic hydrocarbons that produce the pleasant or unpleasant smells of gasoline are very different from, if you are old enough, what you might remember.
But what might make gasoline smell nice? It’s probably benzene. Benzene once WAS motor fuel. In the early years of automobiling what Americans called “gasoline” and the Brits call “petrol” was either pure benzene or a mixture containing primarily benzene. And that is why some of the expensive prostitutes in the early 1900s at the best bordello in the United States, the Everleigh House in Chicago, used gasoline as a perfume.
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Explanation:
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