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Cracked.com tells the story of Joy Milne - as a kid she'd play games of identifying varieties of rose by their respective smells, and later on as a nurse she discovered an ability - like canines - to detect various diseases, including Parkinson's (notoriously hard to diagnose early) which led to a reliable skin swab test.

It reminds me of a party-trick the physicist Richard Feynman had, where he would ask folks to touch just one book on a shelf when he was out of a room, then he would come back and identify the book by smell alone.

Famously, the sense of smell goes way back in the brain, and connects to emotional centers more directly than most of our other sensors, but it's challenging to learn to trust it - you can't pinpoint a source like you can with sight or touch or sometimes sound, acclimation happens quickly, it all seems so subjective, but maybe most importantly it's hard to quantify the sensations and put them into words. (I do think verbalization is an important part of cognition for most of us - language is the structure with which we build thoughts, not just describe them after the fact.) Also we associate so many smells with negative things - like even the Feynman story seems a little gross, there's an instinctive revulsion about it... I guess it's just a part of how we are part of our environment - the boundaries aren't as precise as we would like.