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There are countless tales about how talented dogs are with their snouts, sniffing things out that are basically beyond recognition for us humans.

You’ll have encountered this at airport security if you happened to have some leftover plant matter scattered at the bottom of your bag, no?

Or perhaps you realised the power of a dog’s nose when reading about Barra, the English Springer Spaniel from Scotland, with a wild knack for sniffing dead bodies underwater.

We all know dogs are special, but a new study is revealing just how special they are.

Published in the Journal of Neuroscience and led by a team of vets, it’s found that dogs’ sense of smell and sense of vision are closely linked in their brains, which means that they can basically “see” with their noses.

The study has shed amazing new light on how dogs experience and navigate the world, suggesting that they connect scents in such a way as to work out where and what things are.

Excuse me, fellow fluffy, may I just have a look at you with my nose:

Image: Jean Louis Aubert / Getty Images

This revelation has not yet been found in any other species, per NBC News:

“The most interesting thing about this research are the connections from the nose up to the occipital lobe, which houses the visual cortex,” said veterinary neurologist Philippa Johnson, an associate professor at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and senior author of the study.

She and her colleagues studied MRI scans of the brains of 23 dogs that showed neurological connections between the olfactory bulb, where smells are recognized, and their occipital lobe, where vision is processed.

Sky News elaborated that these findings also showed an “extensive pathway” connecting to the limbic system, which is the part of the brain involved in behavioural and emotional responses.

Much like how we react emotionally to something we see, is it then possible that our puppers may feel something based on what they smell?

When humans walk into a room, we know what’s up by looking around and orientating things, but a dog might do this with smell, too.

This is most striking with dogs who can’t even see a thing:

[Dr Johnson] added: “One of the ophthalmologists at the hospital here said he regularly has owners that bring their dogs in, and when he tests their eyesight, they are completely blind – but the owners literally won’t believe him.

[sources:skynews&nbcnews]