How Animal Make “Sense” of Scents :Study

Animals have a strong sense of smell which is helpful in identifying prey from predator and this capability to distinguish odors extends their lifespan.

A study to research this ability of animals to distinguish specific odors and friend and foe was conducted on mice. They were trained to detect specific odors from a random mixture, but the scientists noticed that their ability to detect specific smells steadily fell with increasing background component.

The mice were able to identify the specific smell with 85 percent accuracy or higher. However, previous studies conducted concluded that many creatures are not good at differentiating between scents, and can focus on singular smells.

 "Although the mice do well overall, they perform progressively poorer when the number of background odours increases," lead study author Venkatesh Murthy, a Harvard professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology explained.

"There is a continuous stream of information constantly arriving at our senses, coming from many different sources," said Murthy, in a news release."  The classic example would be a cocktail party - though it may be noisy, and there may be many people talking, we are able to focus our attention on one person, while ignoring the background noise.

"This study is interesting because it first shows that smells are not always perceived as one whole object - they can be broken down into their pieces," Murphy concluded. "This is perhaps not a surprise - there are in fact coffee or wine specialists that can detect faint whiffs of particular elements within the complex mixture of flavors in each coffee or wine. But by doing these studies in mice, we can now get a better understanding of how the brain does this. One can also imagine that understanding how this is done may also allow us to build artificial olfactory systems that can detect specific chemicals in the air that are buried amidst a plethora of other odors."

The study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience .