Summary: A probabilistic approach helps to explain how the brain might identify individual odors in an environment with multiple smells.
Walk into a diner around breakfast time, and you’re likely to be hit with an array of enticing odors — steaming coffee, freshly baked muffins, bacon sizzling on the grill. Given that each of these smells is made up of a mix of different volatile compounds all hitting our olfactory system at the same time, how does our brain discern the identity of the different foods?