As hunter-gatherers, humans used their sense of smell to identify plants and animals, find way within a foraging area, or distinguish each other by gender, age, kinship, social dominance. Because women gathered while men hunted, the sexes evolved different sensitivities plant animal odors. They also ended up emitting Male odors served intimidate rival males assert With rise farming sedentism, n...

PURPOSE To evaluate brain activity associated with sexual arousal, fully conscious male marmoset monkeys were imaged during presentation of odors that naturally elicit high levels of sexual activity and sexual motivation. MATERIAL AND METHODS Male monkeys were lightly anesthetized, secured in a head and body restrainer with a built-in birdcage resonator and positioned in a 9.4-Tesla spectrome...

Although people are poor at naming odors, naming a smell helps to remember that odor. Previous studies show wine experts have better memory for smells, and they also name wine and wine-related smells differently than novices. This leads us to ask whether wine experts’ odor memory is verbally mediated? In addition, does the odor memory advantage that experts have over novices generalize to all o...

We behaviorally explore the link between olfaction, emotion and memory by testing the hypothesis that the emotion carried by odors facilitates the memory of specific unique events. To investigate this idea, we used a novel behavioral approach inspired by a paradigm developed by our team to study episodic memory in a controlled and as ecological as possible way in humans. The participants freely...

BACKGROUND Successful cooperation depends on reliable identification of friends and foes. Social insects discriminate colony members (nestmates/friends) from foreign workers (non-nestmates/foes) by colony-specific, multi-component colony odors. Traditionally, complex processing in the brain has been regarded as crucial for colony recognition. Odor information is represented as spatial patterns ...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Patients with olfactory dysfunction benefit from repeated exposure to odors, so-called olfactory training (OT). This does not mean occasional smelling but the structured sniffing of a defined set of odors, twice daily, for a period of 4 months or longer. In this prospective study, we investigated whether the effect of OT might increase through the use of more odors and ext...

Several studies have shown that a woman's vaginal or axillary odors convey information on her attractivity. Yet, whether such scents induce psychoneuroendocrinological changes in perceivers is still controversial. We studied if smelling axillary and vulvar odors collected in the periovulatory and late luteal phases of young women modify salivary testosterone and cortisol levels, as well as sexu...

Previous positron emission tomography studies of right-handed individuals show that the left orbitofrontal cortex is dominant during emotional processing of odors. We collected functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 28 subjects to study this network as a function of odor hedonic valence (pleasant vs. unpleasant), active hedonic judgments versus passive sensation of hedonically charged ...