The discovery of odor - detecting receptors in the fruit fly Drosophila may help scientists better understand how insects and eventually other animals
process olfactory information and how odors...
These regions receive quite
crude olfactory information very early in the brain's smell processing pathways, which may explain why people have such a hard time identifying odors.
To shed new light on this question, the researchers focused on the development of the fly's smell circuit — the neurons that
carry olfactory information from its antenna to the memory center of its brain — during the first few days after it is hatched.
In the study, HaDi MaBouDi of Queen Mary University of London and colleagues built a realistic computational model of the brain circuits used by bees to
process olfactory information.
One of the things that makes smell distinctive is that
olfactory information is not rooted through this «switchboard» structure called the thalamus on the way to other «thinking» brain regions.
As for most animals,
olfactory information is very important to cockroaches.
People spend more time interpreting visual data than
olfactory information.
There was no relationship between dogs» histories with cats and other small animals and their reactions to visual or
olfactory information.