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Building on the idea that metaphors we use in language can influence our social cognition (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), Spike Lee had been busy exposing participants to fishy smells (made from a mixture of anchovy and sardine concentrates). What he wanted to test was whether these literally fishy smells would make people more suspicious of others.
In several studies, he found just that.
— Read more in What’s That Smell? The Psychology of Scent at Psychology Today.
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The researchers found that for every one-point increase in both olfactory identification and sensitivity scores, there was a significant and meaningful reduction in frailty status. The study can't prove cause and effect, but the implication is that improvements in smell were associated with improved health status and resilience, the study authors noted.
— Read more in Loss of smell associated with frailty in older adults at UPI.
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Our sense of smell is clearly a complex process; it involves hundreds of different odorant receptors working in concert. The more an odor stimulates a particular neuron, the more electrical signals that neuron sends to the brain. But researchers at UC Santa Barbara discovered that these neurons actually fall silent when an odor rises above a certain threshold. Remarkably, this was integral to how the brain recognized each smell. "It's a feature; it's not a bug," said Matthieu Louis, an associate professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology [at University of California - Santa Barbara].
— Read more in Researchers reveal an added layer of nuance in our sense of smell at ScienceDaily.
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Recently, Debajit Saha, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan State University, and his team tapped into the odor-sensing circuitry of the locust brain to detect the scent signatures of human oral cancers. Saha previously used locusts for sniffing out bombs, making the transition to cancer detection an interesting one.
— Read more in Scents and Sense-Abilities: Using Bug Brainpower to Smell Cancer at TheScientist.
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A team at the University of Lisbon was conducting research to map brain activity and brain response to certain fragrances, working to create a database of results that provided subjective and objective insight into human response to scents.
“The goal is, in effect, to build a database so when you have a fragrance or a blend, you can predict what the response of our customers will be,” said Hugo Alexandre-Ferreira PhD, associate professor at the University of Portugal.
Read more in University of Lisbon mapping brain responses to fragrance: 'Sense of smell is the most mysterious' at Cosmetics Design-Europe.