The worldwide popularity of garlic as a food ingredient and its therapeutic stature in folklore both stem in part from the distinctive pungency associated with its raw, uncooked state. Researchers this week report that this pungency, manifested as a characteristic mixture of burning and prickling sensations and flavor, can be ascribed largely to the effects of a particular compound and its ability to activate specific protein thermoreceptors in the mouth. The findings are reported in the May 24 issue of Current Biology by a team led by Ardem Patapoutian of The Scripps Research Institute and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation. Despite garlic's popularity, the compounds responsible for its pungency, as well as the receptors through which we perceive those compounds, have remained unknown. In their new work, the researchers found that raw, but not baked, garlic was capable of eliciting responses from two so-called TRP ("trip") channels, TRPV1 and TRPA1, which belong to a remarkable family of receptors that can be activated by temperature and chemicals. Some TRP channels, including TRPA1 and TRPV1, respond to both temperature and chemical compounds: TRPV1 is known to respond to noxious (painful) heat and to the pungent component of chili peppers, whereas TRPA1 is activated by noxious cold and by pungent compounds found in cinnamon oil, mustard oil, and wintergreen oil. These past findings, as well as the present work, indicate that thermosensitive TRP channels play a key role in the phenomenon of chemesthesis (the somatosensory contribution to the sense of taste), which is experienced, for example, in the heat of chili peppers or the coolness of peppermint. Both TRPV1 and TRPA1 are found in pain-sensing neurons that innervate the mouth and tongue.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 7393 - Posted: 05.25.2005

As people line up at ticket counters and take their chances, what's going on in the heads? David Zald, psychology professor at Vanderbilt University, has found that the feeling of excitement might be linked to the release in the brain of dopamine, a chemical associated with the pleasure people get from eating, sex, and drugs. But it's not actually the winning that brings on the release of this pleasure chemical - just the thought of winning. Zald and his team used positron emission topography (PET) to observe the brain activity in nine people who were given gambling-like activities to perform. "The main thing that we wanted to see, first off, was whether we could image dopamine release in humans while they were winning money," says Zald. "Our key hypothesis was that we would indeed be able to see dopamine release while people are winning money." In the first gambling-like activity, the volunteer chose one of four cards, knowing a reward of one dollar was possible, but not knowing when; in other words, the reward was unpredictable. In the second activity, the people knew they would get the reward with every fourth card chosen, so the reward was predictable. In the third activity, people chose cards without expecting to get a reward at all. (C) ScienCentral, 2000-2005

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 7392 - Posted: 05.25.2005

Human beings tend to recognize six basic color categories-- black, white, red, yellow, green, and blue -- no matter what language they speak, according to new research. The work suggests that color categories are based on universal human perceptions and contradicts earlier work that describes color perception as wholly dependent on how language divvies up and names colors. Although all humans with normal vision can detect the full spectrum of visible light, how they subdivide colors differs substantially. The color categories that different languages consider fundamental range from just two (light and dark) to more than a dozen. Some languages give the same name to blue and green tints; others have specific terms for light blue and dark blue. Because of this, some scientists suggest that color perception depends largely on the language one speaks. But other researchers have found that people have an easier time recognizing and remembering the six "basic" colors, no matter their language. This "universalist" view of color perception gains support from a paper published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Paul Kay of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, and colleagues asked 2700 speakers of 110 different languages to name and sort 330 differently colored chips. Then the team asked the volunteers to select chips that best represented various color terms used in their language. Regardless of their native tongue, people gravitated to just six colors. For instance, people whose languages use one word for both blue and green picked either blue or green--not blue-green--as the most representative example of that color. This, says Kay, suggests that human vision tends to classify certain colors regardless of the language used to describe them. Copyright © 2005 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 7391 - Posted: 06.24.2010

When it comes to the world laid before us, our mind's eye has a bias. For reasons that are not entirely clear, during some tasks humans have a tendency to devote more visual attention to the left side of the visual world than the right side, a phenomenon known as pseudoneglect. Researchers now report that pseudoneglect is not restricted to humans but is shared by birds, suggesting not only that brain structures thought to play a requisite role in pseudoneglect may not actually be essential for this phenomenon, but also that pseudoneglect may reflect evolutionary adaptations that allow animals to devote attention to multiple aspects of their environment. The findings are reported in the May 24 issue of Current Biology by Bettina Diekamp (now at Johns Hopkins University) and colleagues at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany; the University of Padova, Italy; and The University of Trieste, Italy. It has been known for some time that human patients who have suffered injury to the brain's right hemisphere can experience a much more severe bias in their spatial attention--spatial hemineglect--in which the entire left side of the visual world seems nonexistent as the brain performs spatial tasks. In a classic example, a patient asked to draw a daisy can only manage to put petals on the right side of her drawing. The more subtle leftward bias in attention present in healthy humans likely has to do with asymmetries in the wiring of the brain's attention in the two hemispheres; the new finding in birds offers some insight into how and why this might be.

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 7390 - Posted: 05.25.2005

Researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have succeeded in mapping the unique patterns of neural activity produced by a wide range of odors, including vanilla, skunk, fish, urine, musk, and chocolate. Revealing these distinct - but often overlapping - patterns of neural activity represents a significant step in understanding how the brain translates complex signals from odorant receptors in the nose into odor perception in the brain, the researchers said. The research team, which was led by HHMI investigator Linda B. Buck at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, published its findings May 23, 2005, in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Buck's co-authors included postdoctoral fellows Zhihua Zou and Fusheng Li. Buck shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with HHMI investigator Richard Axel of Columbia University for their discovery of the huge family of odorant receptors and their previous work on the organization of the olfactory system. Whenever you inhale the aroma of vanilla, the neurons in your brain “light up” with a characteristic pattern of activity. It turns out that pattern is, perhaps unsurprisingly, unique from the pattern of brain activity associated with a whiff of skunk spray. The process of smelling an odor begins with odorant receptors that are located on the surface of nerve cells inside the nose. When an odorant receptor detects an odor molecule, it triggers a nerve signal that travels to a way station in the brain called the olfactory bulb. Signals from the olfactory bulb, in turn, travel to the brain's olfactory cortex. Information from the olfactory cortex is then sent to many regions of the brain, ultimately leading to the perceptions of odors and their emotional and physiological effects. © 2005 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 7389 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Hopkin Female redback spiders are not the most sympathetic of lovers: they routinely begin to eat their suitors before they've had a chance to finish mating. And now research shows that their internal anatomy also helps them get one over males, by influencing which mates get to fertilize their eggs. The female redback (Latrodectus hasselti) has two organs for storing sperm, called spermathecae, explain Lindsay Snow and Maydianne Andrade, of the University of Toronto in Canada. Although biologists already knew about these twin sperm sacs, they had not investigated how they affect the issue of paternity when a spider mates with more than one male. The two sperm sacs help to prevent a male from stealing a mating advantage simply by being the first to court a female, Snow and Andrade suggest. A male has two sperm-depositing organs, called palps, that correspond to the female's two sperm sacs, although he can use only one palp in a mating session. A male tends to break off the end of his mating palp inside the female's sperm sac, partly blocking its entrance, the researchers say. "This functions as a plug, a kind of chastity belt," explains Paul Hillyard, curator of arachnids at the Natural History Museum in London. Having two sperm sacs may therefore give females extra choice over who fathers her young, Snow and Andrade say. If one of the sacs is blocked by a mate, a subsequent partner can still be given the opportunity to deposit his sperm in the other. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 7388 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Animals have evolved a foraging behaviour that comes close what physicists calculate is the fastest way to find hidden objects, a new study reveals. Searching animals quickly move to the first location, then slowly search that small area, before quickly moving to another area and repeating the process. That does not surprise biologists who have studied foraging and who say evolution should find the best strategy because it pays off in survival. The two-stage search process is an instinctive one evident when humans search for missing keys, for example, as well as when animals search for food. People search carefully around one location, then move quickly to another where they hope to find the missing object and search again. That behaviour reflects the difficulty of spotting objects while moving quickly. Olivier Bénichou at the University of Paris 6 and colleagues modelled the process as if animals moved along a straight line, switching randomly between a "moving" phase - when they cannot find objects - and "searching" phases where they hunt while doing a slow, random walk. To find the optimum search method, the team calculated what pattern of switching between moving and searching states would find randomly placed objects in the shortest time. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 7387 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Different parts of the brain must work together to understand sarcasm, new research suggests. The prefrontal cortex - a small area in the front of the brain - seems to play the biggest role and may integrate the literal meaning of a phrase with the speaker’s emotional intent. The findings on the anatomy of sarcasm could have implications for understanding personality changes in people with brain injury or disease. “Decision making, emotional processing, empathy, and theory of mind all appear to be involved in understanding sarcasm,” says lead researcher Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a neuropsychologist at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel. Previous research has shown that people with damage in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) have difficulty understanding non-verbal aspects of language like tone, says Richard Delmonico, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at Davis, US. Researchers studied 25 participants with damage to their prefrontal lobes, 16 participants with damage in the posterior lobes, and 17 healthy controls. They assessed people’s ability to understand someone else’s emotional state by testing how well they could recognise different facial expressions and tone of voice. To determine if participants understood sarcasm, researchers read a sarcastic and non-sarcastic version of a story and asked participants what the speaker meant in each situation. They also tested ‘theory of mind’ - the ability to understand another person’s frame of mind - by determining if people could recognise when a story contained a “social faux-pas”. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 7386 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY The Food and Drug Administration may soon approve a medical device that would be the first new treatment option for severely depressed patients in a generation, despite the misgivings of many experts who say there is little evidence that it works. The pacemaker-like device, called a vagus nerve stimulator, is surgically implanted in the upper chest, and its wires are threaded into the neck, where it stimulates a nerve leading to the brain. It has been approved since 1997 for the treatment of some epilepsy patients, and the drug agency has told the manufacturer that it is now "approvable" for severe depression that is resistant to other treatment. But in the only rigorously controlled trial so far in depressed patients, the stimulator was no more effective than surgery in which it was implanted but not turned on. While some patients show significantly improved moods after having the $15,000 device implanted, most do not, the study found. And once the device is implanted, it is hard to remove entirely; surgeons say the wire leads are usually left inside the neck. Proponents say that many severely depressed patients do not respond to antidepressants or electroshock therapy and that those patients are desperate for any treatment to relieve their suffering. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 7385 - Posted: 05.21.2005

We may take our long-term memory for granted, but it doesn't come cheap. According to a new study in fruit flies, such memories can shave off hours of life when the going gets rough. Scientists can breed flies to have better memories, but flies in the wild haven't evolved the skill themselves. This has stumped researchers, who assume that remembering the details of a dangerous situation would help flies live longer. So some have wondered whether making such memories comes at a significant biological cost. To test the idea, evolutionary biologists Frederic Mery and Tadeusz Kawecki, of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, gave fruit flies a bad experience to remember. They wafted a stinky chemical at flies in a tube and then vigorously shook the tube, so the flies would learn to associate the smell with danger. Some flies were given a 20 minute rest between shakes--a pause that allowed them to manufacture proteins required for the development of one type of long-term memory, while others got no break, permitting them only to develop a less permanent form of long-term memory. The next day, the researchers quizzed the flies by seeing if the creatures would avoid going down a maze path toward the chemical. Both groups were equally wary, while control flies didn't care. When the team stressed the flies by withholding food and water for 2 days, the flies that had only formed the less permanent form of long-term memory went on to live about 20% longer than the flies with longer-lasting long-term recall. The results indicate that the latter type of memory comes at a price because it requires additional protein manufacturing. This could explain why fruit fly memory is limited in the wild, says Mery, whose team reports its results today in Science. Copyright © 2005 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 7384 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Christen Brownlee Made-to-order stem cells that genetically match a patient's own tissues could provide a perfect patch for replacing cells damaged by injury or disease. This approach would avoid immune rejection (SN: 4/2/05, p. 218: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050402/bob10.asp). By priming embryonic cells with genetic material derived from people with problems that stem cells may one day treat, researchers have isolated 11 new lines of stem cells that exactly match the patients' own DNA. Therapeutic cloning, which yields stem cells that can be used to treat patients, differs from reproductive cloning, which creates a new organism. However, the two types of cloning use many of the same techniques. Scientists start by removing an egg's nucleus, which carries most of a cell's genetic material. They then inject the egg with a nucleus from a donor cell, such as a skin cell. After the cell divides and grows into a multicelled embryo, researchers doing therapeutic cloning extract stem cells that carry the same genetic signature as that of the donated nucleus. Until recently, researchers' ambitions were hampered by difficulties in creating clones of human cells. Last year, a team led by Woo Suk Hwang at Seoul National University in South Korea succeeded in making the first human clone and in isolating stem cells from it (SN: 2/14/04, p. 99: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040214/fob1.asp). Copyright ©2005 Science Service.

Keyword: Stem Cells
Link ID: 7383 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Marc Kaufman, Washington Post Staff Writer Older pain sufferers and their doctors often shun morphine-based medications such as OxyContin and Percocet, but a new study suggests that those over 60 are often better candidates for the medications than younger patients. Not only do older people report greater pain relief, but they are much less likely than younger patients to need rapidly escalating dosages to control their pain, the research found. In the first systematic look at age differences among patients taking opioids, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco pain clinic found that on average, patients under 50 required medication twice as strong as that needed by patients over 60. After almost two years, the older patients reported they still got relief on the low doses, while the younger patients reported little pain relief even after their dosages were increased. "Because of the continuing stigma associated with opioids among many older people, the group that stands to benefit the most from the pain relief they give are getting the least," lead author Pamela Palmer said in a telephone interview. "Doctors are reluctant to prescribe the opioids, and seniors are reluctant to take them." © Copyright 1996-2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 7382 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The visual cortex of the adult primate brain displays less flexibility in response to retinal injury than previously thought, according to a new study published in the May 19, 2005, issue of the journal Nature. This may have implications for other regions of the brain, and the approach the investigators used may be a key to developing successful neurological interventions for stroke patients in the future. Stelios M. Smirnakis, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute physician-postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, and colleagues including Nikos K. Logothetis of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor cortical activity for seven and one-half months after injury to the retina of adult monkeys. They found limited reorganization in the primary visual cortex. Their results contradict previous thinking. In a “News and Views” commentary published in the same issue of Nature, Martin I. Sereno, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, says the latest data indicate that adult brains may be less plastic than scientists had hoped. In children, the brain's ability to compensate for injuries is well known. Children with severe epilepsy who lose an entire hemisphere during surgery can regain motor control on the affected side of their body and go on to develop normal language skills. But in adults, the case for brain plasticity has been less clear. © 2005 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 7381 - Posted: 06.24.2010

University of Minnesota researchers have demonstrated for the first time how estrogen affects learning and memory. They found that estrogen can activate particular glutamate receptors within the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for many aspects of learning and memory. Glutamate is the primary excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain, allowing for fast communication between neurons. By examining hippocampal neurons from rats, researchers also observed that estrogen only activated the processes related to learning and memory in the brains of female rats and not males. While it has been well documented that estrogen influences other behaviors beyond reproduction, including learning and memory, the mechanism has remained elusive. The findings of this research are in this week's Journal of Neuroscience. "We believe this is an important first step in understanding not just how estrogen affects learning and memory, but also a variety of non-reproductive behaviors," says Paul Mermelstein, Ph.D., assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota and lead researcher. "Estrogen activation of glutamate receptors within other brain regions could also potentially account for the well-documented actions of this hormone on female motor control and pain sensation."

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 7380 - Posted: 05.20.2005

At the end of a long day, when fatigue comes wafting over our limbs and starts to tip our lids shut it seems blatantly obvious why we need sleep - we're tired. But surprisingly, why we need sleep and what exactly happens in the brain to trigger sleep is one of the greatest mysteries of neuroscience. "It's actually the big question - why do we need sleep?" says University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center brain scientist Masashi Yanagisawa, whose research team recently came one step closer to answering that question. Yanagisawa and his colleagues combined two established scientific techniques to identify and map, for the first time, a prominent sleep circuit in the brains of mice. They say the circuit helps balance sleep patterns in all mammals, including people, though they still don't know what tips that balance to either wake us up or put us to sleep. Yanagisawa hopes his team's map will at least shed new light on sleep's dark mysteries as well as lead to new treatments for people with narcolepsy. "We believe that our research will open up the future avenue for devising a new way of treating various sleep disorders," he says. Yanagisawa's team focused their research in an area of the brain known to regulate sleep, called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is packed with different sleep regulating neurons (nerve cells). The researchers wanted to disentangle one specific set known as "orexin neurons." Orexin neurons are informally called "wake up" neurons because they are brain cells that release a hormone, called orexin, that help keeps people awake. Orexin is a chemical messenger (also known as a neurotransmitter) that travels to different parts of the brain to keep those areas awake, keeping us from falling asleep all the time. People with narcolepsy actually have weak orexin signaling systems. (C) ScienCentral, 2000-2005.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 7379 - Posted: 05.20.2005

Artificial sweeteners have come a long way from the days of bitter-tasting saccharine. But still, "What is, I think, pretty clear to anybody who's ever tried to diet, most of the sweeteners don't taste exactly like sugar," says biophysicist Mariana Max, who uses sugar in the lab, but not in the lunchroom, where she sticks to a low-carb diet. Max, and her group at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, want to figure out how some five hundred different sweet compounds can provoke the sensation of sweet taste by binding to protein molecules, called "receptors" in our taste cells, and somehow triggering a cascade of events that relays the sweet signals to our brains "To the point where your brain can say, 'oh, there's something sweet in my mouth'," Max says. "One of the things we're trying to understand is how all of these different compounds can bind and activate this single receptor. The more we understand about how each of these individual sweeteners interacts with and binds to the receptor, the better able we will be to design sweeteners that taste more like sugar." The upper surface of our tongues is covered in a concentration of taste buds each of which contains 50 to 100 taste cells representing all five taste sensations: salty, sour, sweet, bitter and umami (savoriness such as the taste of monosodium glutamate (MSG)). These cells respond to food in the way they do because the shape of their surface receptor proteins fit and bind to different taste sensation compounds. The receptor proteins straddle the outer membrane of cell and send taste signals into the cell. (C) ScienCentral, 2000-2005.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 7378 - Posted: 05.20.2005

Embryonic stem cells with identical genomes grow into distinctive tissues, such as heart, bone, and brain. At one time, scientists believed the differences among cell types arose from various sets of genes switched on inside developing cells. Then, studies showed that adult neurons uniquely lack a protein that permanently turns off neuronal genes in the rest of the body's cells. Now, it turns out that precursor nerve cells contain that same repressive protein after all. In fact, the protein directs the complex network of genes that transforms an embryonic stem cell into a mature nerve cell, say Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers. This new study, published in the May 20, 2005, issue of the journal Cell, may be among the first to track a set of genes from stem cell to differentiated neuron. It also reveals fundamental details of how stem cells retain developmental plasticity. "A single protein does it all," said Gail Mandel, HHMI investigator at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "It keeps the genes totally off in non-neuronal tissues, such as skin, where you don't dare express a neuronal gene. But it also allows the full elaboration of the neuronal phenotype from the precursor cell."

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 7377 - Posted: 05.20.2005

A diet rich in vitamin E could protect against Parkinson's disease, believe researchers. Good sources of vitamin E include green leafy vegetables, nuts and vegetable oils. A study in Lancet Neurology pooled available data and found people who ate plenty of these foods in their diet were far less likely to develop Parkinson's. The authors said it was impossible to tell if supplements would do the same. Dr Mayhar Etminan, from Queen's University in Canada, and colleagues scrutinised eight studies published between 1966 and 2005 looking at the effects of vitamins E and C, and the nutrient beta carotene. Both moderate and high doses of vitamin E appeared to reduce the risk of Parkinson's. Neither vitamin C or beta carotene had a similar effect, however. Dr Etminan said: "Our data suggest that diets rich in vitamin E protect against the development of Parkinson's disease. But he added: "No definite conclusions regarding the benefits of supplemental vitamin E can be made. "Given that these data are observational, confirmation from well-designed randomised controlled trial is necessary before suggesting changes in routine clinical practice." A spokesman from the Parkinson's Disease Society agreed. He cautioned against people rushing out and buying lots of vitamin E supplements to ward of Parkinson's. In high doses, vitamin E can be toxic. (C)BBC

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 7376 - Posted: 05.20.2005

In studies with rats, researchers have distinguished a burst of the brain chemical dopamine from a reward-related brain region that is associated with anticipating the delivery of cocaine. The finding, publishing in the May 19 issue of Neuron, reveals the brain signal that likely underlies the fundamental motivation to obtain such drugs, said the scientists. Thus, the finding may give clues to the basic brain mechanism that causes drug-seeking behavior, they said. In their experiments, researchers led by Regina M. Carelli of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill used infinitesimally small recording electrodes in the brains of rats to detect the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine from the region called the nucleus accumbens. Almost all drugs of abuse cause release of dopamine from this region--part of the brain's reward system. Such release triggers neurons in other brain regions, generating the pleasurable sensation associated with taking such drugs. The researchers first taught rats to self-administer cocaine by pressing a lever when a light in their cage came on. They next extinguished this behavior by substituting saline solution for the cocaine. Finally, they reinstated the lever-pressing behavior by restoring the cocaine. Their measurements revealed three distinct types of transient bursts of dopamine from the nucleus accumbens. One dopamine signal that occurred immediately before a lever press continued to occur, even after the rats ceased to receive cocaine. This signal, concluded the researchers, could reflect the motivation to obtain the drug.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 7375 - Posted: 05.20.2005

In a finding that holds lessons for restaurateurs and advertisers, researchers have found that visual words can influence the perception of smells--with pleasant words influencing olfactory brain regions to perceive an odor as pleasant. The research is publishing in the May 19 issue of Neuron. In their experiments, researchers led by Edmund T. Rolls of the University of Oxford presented subjects with a cheddar cheese odorant and showed them labels that read either "cheddar cheese" or "body odor." They found that the subjects rated the odor significantly more pleasant when it was labeled "cheddar cheese" than "body odor." They then scanned the subjects' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during the presentation of labels and odors to explore which brain regions were activated. They also analyzed brain activity when the subjects were presented with clean air labeled either "cheddar cheese" or "body odor." The widely used analytical technique of fMRI uses harmless magnetic fields and radio waves to measure blood flow in regions of the brain, which reflects brain activity. The researchers found that labeling the odor "cheddar cheese" produced an activation in a specific part of the brain region that processes olfactory information. Clean air labeled as "cheddar cheese" activated the same area, but to a lesser extent. The "body odor" label, however, did not produce activation in this area, either with the cheddar cheese odor or clean air.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Language
Link ID: 7374 - Posted: 05.20.2005