Neuroscience

How the brain can distinguish good from bad smells

Scientists from Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, have found that in fruit flies, the quality and intensity of odors can be mapped in the so-called lateral horn. They have created a spatial map of ...

Neuroscience

Temporal processing in the olfactory system

The neural machinery underlying our olfactory sense continues to be an enigma for neuroscience. A recent review in Neuron seeks to expand traditional ideas about how neurons in the olfactory bulb might encode information ...

Medical research

Nose's response to odors more than just a simple sum of parts

Take a sniff of a freshly poured glass of wine, and the prevailing scientific thinking would suggest that the harmony of fragrances involves sensory receptors in the nose simply adding up the individual odors they encounter. ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Our sense of smell alters the colors we see, show scientists

Our five senses bombard us with environmental input 24/7. One way our brain makes sense of this abundance of information is by combining information from two or more senses, such as between smells and the smoothness of textures, ...

Medical research

New perspectives on sensory mechanisms

The latest Perspectives in General Physiology series examines the mechanisms of visual, aural, olfactory, and tactile processes that inform us about the environment. The series appears in the September 2011 issue of the Journal ...

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