New research digs into how your brain processes smells.
What happens when we smell lavender? How does our brain process the essence of its fragrance?
Is it like a painting—a snapshot of the flickering activity of cells—captured in a moment in time? Or like a symphony, an evolving ensemble of different cells working together to capture the scent?
The new study suggests that our brain does both.
“These findings reveal a core principle of the nervous system, flexibility in the kinds of calculations the brain makes to represent aspects of the sensory world,” says Krishnan Padmanabhan, an associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester and senior author of the study in Cell Reports.
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