Smell circuitry, stalled stem cells and more reader feedback
Odor confusion
People just aren’t very good at putting names to smells. It turns out that the odor-to-language interface in the brain may be less efficient than the sophisticated neural circuitry that processes visual and auditory information, as Rachel Ehrenberg reported in “Brain regions link odors to words” (SN: 12/13/14, p. 8).
“Imagine my surprise when I read your short article on how the brain links words to odors,” wrote Tim Geho. “It states that ‘people have a hard time identifying odors.’ Just the very day before, I read … that instead of the long-held belief that people can distinguish about 10,000 scents, it is now thought that the average person can detect at least a trillion different smells. These two articles seem to reach vastly different conclusions.”