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Our Mind-Boggling Sense of Smell - Issue 91: The Amazing Brain - Nautilus
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The olfactory sense at work
Our sense of smell works in wondrous ways since the chemical composition of our surrounding change instantly and constantly. Our noses pick up volatile airborne compounds that interact with our olfactory receptors.
The information that we get from our surroundings pass through our noses and then to the core cortex in the brain. We, humans have about 400 types of olfactory receptors which is used to identify many different types of chemicals that have varying odor quality.
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Facts about our olfactory sense
- It is different from other sensory cortices in a way that it has a multidimensional stimulus.
- Some things can smell different not just between different people but also for the same person.
- Can measure an array of an uncertain variety of chemicals that can trace changes that detects pleasure, pain, or danger.
- It does not require a map mirroring because its chemical stimulus is constantly changing. It relies on the brain to recognize the pattern or memory associated with the smell.
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Contributors to the study of the olfactory sense
- Santiago Ramón y Cajal: A founding father of neuroscience, he drew attention to the sense of smell as an exemplary model to learn how the brain makes sense of the world. He also believed that understanding smell would grant us better insight into other sensory systems
- Linda Buck & Richard Axel: They discovered the olfactory receptors which happened to be the most structurally diverse and sizable member of the largest multi-gene family of protein receptors. They received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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According to a 2004 research, the sense of smell is a complicated process.
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