Who Moved My Cheese!? Researchers Find That 'One Sniff Will Do' For Odor Discrimination

By measuring the speed of smell, researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have now found that unlike humans, rats can tell two very similar odors apart with just one sniff. And because it's not the Nose that Knows, but rather the brain, such studies of how animals can rapidly and accurately discriminate odors are revealing vital new information about how the human brain processes information, guides behavior, and even enables us to be consciously aware of our own (though less smelly) world, and our own selves.

"We are trying to understand how systems of neurons participate in the creation of perception, awareness, and behavior," says Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory neuroscientist Zach Mainen, who led the new study.

By exploring the neural mechanisms by which rodents use odors to guide their behavior, Mainen and his colleagues hope to uncover basic principles of brain function that will apply in many settings, including how our own brains work. But to get there, they needed to start out by measuring seemingly strange things such as how many sniffs a rat takes per second. The answer, according to the new study: about eight sniffs per second.

Believe it or not, the "eight sniffs per second" measurement has helped resolve a hotly debated issue in neuroscience. Researchers have previously suggested that the brain requires extra processing time to distinguish among the millions of different chemical signals that can be picked up by the nose. The new study, which appears in the November issue of Nature Neuroscience (advance online publication date: October 20), overturns this conventional wisdom that smell is a slow sense.

"We found that a rat gets a complete sense of an odor with each sniff. So the animal can reassess what it's smelling quite rapidly, and alter its behavior accordingly. Therefore, compared with other forms of sensory perception, smell is a fast sense, not a slow one," says Mainen.

"Humans are far more attuned to the visual world, but the computations our brains carry out are probably not all that different than in rodents. The neural mechanisms that enable rodents to identify an odor in a single sniff are probably similar to those that help us take in an entire visual scene in a single glance. Moreover, the brains of both rats and humans display the same kind of rhythmic, information processing activity called a theta cycle, which controls many things."

Mainen and his colleagues are currently recording electrical signals from neurons in the brains of rats as they perform the odor discrimination task (see Background Information below). In this way, the researchers hope to learn more about information processing in the olfactory system, and to explore the neural basis of perception, decision-making, and other aspects of behavior.