Brain regions linking odors to words pinpointed
Early processing may be why smells are hard to identify
The nose may know, but the brain has a hard time making sense of smells.
Scientists have identified two brain regions that act as an interface between odor and language, helping guide word choices that describe what the nose smells. These regions receive quite crude olfactory information very early in the brain’s smell processing pathways, which may explain why people have such a hard time identifying odors.
“It seems that smell is integrated at a very early stage,” says cognitive psychologist Jonas Olofsson, who led the new study, published November 5 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Unlike visual and auditory information, which travel through much more circuitry before reaching the brain’s language network, smell data seems to come in rough and unedited.