We often only realize how important our sense of smell is when it is no longer there: food hardly tastes good, or we no longer react to dangers such as the smell of smoke. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), the University of Bonn and the University of Aachen have investigated the neuronal mechanisms of human odor perception for the first time. Individual nerve cells in the brain recognize odors and react specifically to the smell, the image and the written word of an object, for example a banana.
The results of this study close a long-standing knowledge gap between animal and human odor research and have now been published in the renowned journal "Nature". Imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have previously revealed which regions of the human brain are involved in olfactory perception. However, these methods do not allow the sense of smell to be investigated at the fundamental level of individual nerve cells.
Therefore, our understanding of odor processing at the cellular level is mainly based on animal studies, and it has not been clear to what extent these results can be transferred to humans." Prof. Florian Mormann, co-corresponding author from the Department of Epileptology at the UKB, member of the Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA) "Life & Health", University of Bonn Nerve cells in the brain identify odors Prof.
Mormann's research group has now succeeded for the first time in recording the activity of individual ner.
