Joanne's Blog :)

Title:  The Brain Smells What it Expects

Date: 10/11/11

Summary:

In the moments before you “stop and smell the roses,” it’s likely your brain is already preparing your sensory system for that familiar floral smell. Some scientists decided to test this theory. The scientists discovered that the brain automatically gets your senses ready to smell the smell you are about to smell. However, this only works in cases in which youve already experienced the smell. In the study done by scientists, subjects performed “odor search tasks” while being monitored inside an MRI scanner. The two scents used in the study were a watermelon smell and a Play-Doh-like smell. The researchers were able to look at the activity in the brain before any odor arrived and found that when they were looking at the object, the brain activity showed up before even smelling the object. When they were not looking at the object, the brain activity showed up after they had smelled the object.

What I liked and why: I thought that it was very interesting that the brain smells what it expects. Even before you physically smell an object, your sensory systems have already prepared you to do so. I also thought it was cool how they performed the study. The brain is a very complex thing and its amazing how it can get your sensory systems ready to smell something before you’ve even smelt it.