PSY290H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Primary Olfactory Cortex, Olfactory Bulb, Piriform Cortex
Document Summary
Olfaction: receptor in nasal passage picks up chemicals. Gustation: receptor in oral cavity picks up chemicals. These two are referred to as chemical senses and they"re closely related. If you lose your sense of smell, you might have impaired taste. The idea that we have other parts of our brains that also influence our behaviours, so how do we track down the effect of pheromone precisely. They have dendrites that are in the nasal passage, the axons go through the cribriform plate: an area of the skull that has gaps to allow these axons to pass through. Those projections synapse onto the neurons within the olfactory bulb. For rodents, a sense of smell is more critical, influences behaviour more directly than humans. They have the ability to perceive may more smells than we do; they have 1000 diff kinds of receptors whereas we have 300. we don"t have the same variety of receptors as rodents have.
