The ability of aromas to bring back highly specific memories is becoming better understood, and could be used to boost and heal our brains.
Knowing how our brains keep track of the smells we encounter has been a source of fascination for Sandeep Robert Datta, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. In the past two years, he and his colleagues have published two studies that show how short-term and long-term odour memories function in the brain.last December, they tried to understand how short-term neural memories of scents affected the sense of smell in mice.
By watching rodents navigate mazes guided by memories of odours, scientists are getting a sense of how neurons in the brain store this information. And there are also insights into the psychological elements of odour memories in humans. Smells can stir up cherished nostalgia, but there are also times when odours can cause anguish: researchers have shown that certain smells can trigger physiological stress in people with post-traumatic stress disorder .
Igarashi also conducted a rodent experiment, published in 2014, to gain insight into how smell and memory are coded together in the brain. He and his colleagues designed a challenge for rats in which the animals were trained to navigate a maze using scent. One odour would indicate that the animal would need to turn right to find food, whereas another odour indicated the animal had to turn left.
When the mice were learning to associate odour with the sugar water, the cells in their entorhinal cortex were releasing dopamine. This proved to be a key molecule in consolidating the association. When the scientists blocked that dopamine release it impaired the animals’ learning — they would not remember to lick for the sweet reward following exposure to the associated scent.
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