Breathe in deeply and feel the power of your nose. If your sense of smell is firing on all cylinders, you can distinguish among a dizzying array of 1 trillion different odors, according to a new study in the journal Science.

Bad perfume, baby skin, lavender rubbed between your fingers, real apple pie in the oven, and apple-pie-scented candles — the diverse world of odor is yours for the smelling.

“Our sense of smell is amazing,” said Leslie Vosshall, who studies olfaction at the Rockefeller University in New York City. “The whole point of this study is that humans are much better at smelling than we thought.”

When it comes to the senses, smell often gets short shrift. Scientific research has shown humans can distinguish between 2.3 million and 7.5 million colors. It has also shown we can hear 340,000 different tones. But no one had taken the time to learn how many different smells we can access until now.

An influential study published in 1927 suggested that humans could smell about 10,000 different smells, but while that number was widely circulated, it had never been tested. To see if it was anywhere near accurate, Andreas Keller, a research associate in Vosshall’s lab, decided to investigate.

“We really have to give credit to Keller,” said Vosshall. “He is in the business of challenging ideas that are accepted as common knowledge and debunking them.”

“To be clear, we didn’t test 1 trillion smells,” said Vosshall. “We tested a small sampling of them. But people were much better at this than we thought they would be.”

The study’s authors note that the estimate of 1 trillion smells is actually quite conservative.