Researchers of the Duke University Medical Center have found from animal studies that the brain don’t receive fragnance as a single object //, but perceives it, divides it into categories and send to brain's olfactory system (smarter sections) to combine these compounds into a recognizable scent.

Humans may rely on the same smell decoding system, because mice and men have similar brain structures for scent, including an olfactory bulb, the researchers said.

"We wanted to understand how the brain puts together scent signals to make an odor picture. We discovered the whole is the sum of its parts," said Da Yu Lin, Ph.D., who conducted the research as a graduate student studying with neurobiologist Lawrence Katz, Ph.D., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Duke. Katz died in November 2005.

The research appears June 16, 2006, in the journal Neuron. The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Ruth K. Broad Biomedical Research Foundation.

Scientists have long debated how the brain makes order out of the hundreds of volatile chemical compounds that assault the nose. Is the brain's odor code redundant, with single cells responding to multiple components in the smell of a freshly baked cookie? Or does the brain process each scent component like a jigsaw puzzle piece, assembling the signals until it recognizes the picture is a cookie?

To find answers, the Duke researchers exposed mice to different odors and measured response of neurons across the olfactory bulb with intrinsic signal imaging. The imaging technique maps brain activity by detecting changes in reflected light from the brain with a sensitive camera.

To start, the researchers separated and identified the volatile compounds in each odor with gas chromatography. "A complex mixture like urine has at least a hundred separate compounds in it," Lin said. They analyzed scents as diverse as
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