Smellosophy

"A pioneering exploration of olfaction that upsets settled notions of how the brain translates sensory information. Decades of cognition research have shown that external stimuli "spark" neural patterns in particular regions of the brain. This has fostered a view of the brain as a space that we can map: here the brain responds to faces, there it perceives a sensation in your left hand. But it turns out that the sense of smell-only recently attracting broader attention in neuroscience-doesn't work this way. A. S. Barwich asks a deceptively simple question: What does the nose tell the brain,…