We often only realize how important our sense of smell is when it is no longer there: food is not as tasty as it once was, or we no longer react to dangers such as the smell of smoke. Researchers have investigated the neuronal mechanisms of human odor perception for the first time.
Individual nerve cells in the brain recognize odors and react specifically to the smell, the image and the written word of an object, for example a banana. The results of this study close a long-standing knowledge gap between animal and human odor research.
The researchers discovered individual nerve cells that reacted specifically to the smell, the image and the written word of -- for example -- the banana. This discovery indicates that semantic information are processed early on in human olfactory processing. The results not only confirm decades of animal studies, but also show how different brain regions are involved in specific human odor processing functions.
When we smell food, we are more likely to eat -- but new findings suggest eating food also impacts our sense of smell, which could bias what we eat next. Imaging shows that brain's response to ...
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