Here is some more groovy stuff – Scientific American just alerted us to a new article in J Neuroscience. It is right up Charles Spence’s alley but I am stealing his thunder by passing it on now. Charles showed in humans that potato crisps taste better when you hear a crackling noise (I think he might have won an Ignoble prize for that), and these guys, Daniel Wesson and Donald Wilson (double D double U), head towards the other end of the bench to bedside spectrum by observing increased activity in the olfactory tubercle of mice, when the mice heard the researchers swig their coffee. They called it a smound. Blimpressive. Check it out.
Smelling Sounds: Olfactory–Auditory Sensory Convergence in the Olfactory Tubercle
Historical and psychophysical literature has demonstrated a perceptual interplay between olfactory and auditory stimuli—the neural mechanisms of which are not understood. Here, we report novel findings revealing that the early olfactory code is subjected to auditory cross-modal influences…..
Read the rest of the article at the Journal of Neuroscience here
Wesson DW, & Wilson DA (2010). Smelling sounds: olfactory-auditory sensory convergence in the olfactory tubercle. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 30 (8), 3013-21 PMID: 20181598