‘How we smell’ explains the processes, mechanisms, and anatomy behind smell or olfaction. What is the dimensionality of smell? Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers argued that pleasant smells were made up of round atoms and unpleasant smells of pointed ones; while the detail is incorrect, the theory is accurate. When we smell something, olfactory neurons send a response into the brain where they converge with cells with the same receptor type to form a ball-shaped structure, the glomerulus. Higher order neurons then combine signals across glomeruli to extract olfactory information from the environment. All animals with a brain share this basic wiring diagram for detecting smells.
FrameNet-like Annotation of Olfactory Information in Texts
