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?
NEWS
Pouget theorizes that mitral cells, shown here in yellow, compare olfactory predictions with reality. Credit: Charles Greer
News
04/26/2017
Deciphering Scent: How We Untangle the Tapestry of Odors
A probabilistic approach helps to explain how the brain might identify individual odors in an environment with multiple smells.
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