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This is a kidney glomerulus, but the brain has them too, they’re a cluster of nerve endings. source
Here we have a beautiful example of “quantum hedonics,”
which is what I call the ability for odors to be considered both good and bad in a population, and
even within the same individuals. (Hedonics means whether a thing is considered
good or bad.)
At the end of Hidden Scents, there is
an essay detailing this paradoxical nature of the smell of isovaleric acid,
which is the smell of both vomit and
Parmesan cheese. How can a thing be both
good and bad at the same time? One cannot categorize a system where some of
its components are, simultaneously, opposites of eachother. In this case, as
suspected at the end of the article clipped below, the subjective status of the
molecules may depend on the other molecules present. The identity or the status
of one thing is dependent on the identity or status or presence of all the
others. Therefore, in this type of situation, things do not exist in themselves
but as an inseparable part of a whole.
Stinky or
fragrant? Predicting changing odor preferences
Published in Neuron,
the work shows how the activity of neurons in the olfactory processing center
of the Drosophila brain can be decoded to predict behavioral responses to
odors, and reveals that the relative preference
of odors can flip depending on the situation.
...
Their model suggests that each glomerulus contributes to
attraction or aversion with a specific weight. Summing the transformed and
weighted activity of all glomeruli not only matched the real behavioral
responses to the odors used to make the model, but also accurately predicted
responses to new odorants. Kazama notes that contrary to the prevalent
hypothesis in the field, the results imply that this computation does not rely
on a small subset of glomeruli, but likely requires most, if not all, of them.
...
The model also predicted that the relative preference of
odors would vary, and could even switch, depending on the nature of other
odorants present in the environment.
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