It sure seems like we’re discovering an exponential number of fascinating new things about the olfactory system these days. An article that came out of the recent Symposium on Olfaction and Taste has been forwarded to me at least a dozen times already, because it’s so filled with interesting true tales and cliff bits. Check out the studies presented by Dr. Jay Gottfried. In one, humans exposed to just one floral odor for about three minutes markedly improved their abilities to tell families of flower odors apart from one another. Then there’s the one where the people learned to discern “undetectable” differences between an herbal smell and its mirror-image molecular twin. How’d they do that? Electric shock as punishment for the wrong answer! Makes me wish I’d gone to that symposium.
Read more in the New York Times
