( allow the scientists to see which areas...)Study shows humans have ability to track odors, much like bloodhounds

allow the scientists to see which areas of the brain were most active during sniffing and attempts to identify and localize odors. They found that the left and right nostrils have separate areas of the primary olfactory cortex - the brain's smell center - devoted to them, indicating that the brain at least encodes information that could help it localize an odor. A successful detection of an odor is accompanied by more activity in the region of the olfactory cortex associated with the particular nostril.

"While a subject was doing this task, I could look at the brain and tell you how accurate he or she would be on every trial and on the task overall," Sobel said. "So the fact that we have this predictive value in the data really suggests that we have actually successfully captured the mechanism."

What's more, another area of the brain outside the olfactory cortex was very active during successful localization. This area, the superior temporal gyrus, is also involved in the localization of sounds and visual objects, Sobel said.

"It's actually a very nice and elegant convergence of this area, the superior temporal gyrus, that appears to transform non-spatial information into spatial information," he said. "Together, these results are the first description of the mammalian brain mechanisms for extracting spatial information from smell."

One key difference between their experiment and previous experiments to replicate the results of von B�k�sy is that Porter and Sobel asked their subjects to actively sniff, whereas many previous experiments prevented subjects from sniffing.

"We think that most people failed to replicate his results for that reason, that is, the extent to which they enabled natural behavior, specifically sniffing," Sobel said. "In some studies subjects asked to localize an odor wouldn't be allowed to sniff. That's almost like studying auditory localization but having your ears plugged. We actually enabled natural be
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Source:University of California - Berkeley

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