News Release

Who moved my cheese!?

Researchers find that 'one sniff will do' for odor discrimination

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Rats inhabit a world of smells far beyond our poor powers to discriminate. Thousands of odors that smell the same to us, or that we cannot perceive at all, are quickly recognizable as distinct and meaningful odors to rodents and other animals in which the Nose Knows. But just how quick?

By measuring the speed of smell, researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have now found that unlike humans, rats can tell two very similar odors apart with just one sniff. And because it's not the Nose that Knows, but rather the brain, such studies of how animals can rapidly and accurately discriminate odors are revealing vital new information about how the human brain processes information, guides behavior, and even enables us to be consciously aware of our own (though less smelly) world, and our own selves.

"We are trying to understand how systems of neurons participate in the creation of perception, awareness, and behavior," says Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory neuroscientist Zach Mainen, who led the new study.

By exploring the neural mechanisms by which rodents use odors to guide their behavior, Mainen and his colleagues hope to uncover basic principles of brain function that will apply in many settings, including how our own brains work. But to get there, they needed to start out by measuring seemingly strange things such as how many sniffs a rat takes per second. The answer, according to the new study: about eight sniffs per second.

Believe it or not, the "eight sniffs per second" measurement has helped resolve a hotly debated issue in neuroscience. Researchers have previously suggested that the brain requires extra processing time to distinguish among the millions of different chemical signals that can be picked up by the nose. The new study, which appears in the November issue of Nature Neuroscience (advance online publication date: October 20), overturns this conventional wisdom that smell is a slow sense.

"We found that a rat gets a complete sense of an odor with each sniff. So the animal can reassess what it's smelling quite rapidly, and alter its behavior accordingly. Therefore, compared with other forms of sensory perception, smell is a fast sense, not a slow one," says Mainen.

"Humans are far more attuned to the visual world, but the computations our brains carry out are probably not all that different than in rodents. The neural mechanisms that enable rodents to identify an odor in a single sniff are probably similar to those that help us take in an entire visual scene in a single glance. Moreover, the brains of both rats and humans display the same kind of rhythmic, information processing activity called a theta cycle, which controls many things."

Mainen and his colleagues are currently recording electrical signals from neurons in the brains of rats as they perform the odor discrimination task (see Background Information below). In this way, the researchers hope to learn more about information processing in the olfactory system, and to explore the neural basis of perception, decision-making, and other aspects of behavior.

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Contact information for the Principle Investigator of the study:

Zach Mainen, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
e-mail: mainen@cshl.edu
tel: 516-367-8822
website: http://www.cshl.edu/public/SCIENCE/mainen.html


The study will be presented at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (November 8 - 12, 2003, New Orleans, USA). Press enquiries:

Joe Carey
Senior Director, Communications & Public Affairs
Society for Neuroscience
joe@sfn.org

Background Information

In the study, ten rats were trained to sample an odor and respond with one of two choices (move left or right) according to the identity of the odor. They were rewarded for each correct choice with a drop of water. The scientists measured the odor sampling time, that is, the time between the onset of the odor and the rat's choice. The rats performed 200 to 300 discriminations per day for several weeks, leading to a data set of about 34,000 trials. The odors we used were simple organic chemicals such as fatty acids (components of sweaty socks and...some cheeses).

The difficulty of the discrimination was varied by mixing pairs of very similar odor molecules. The researchers used a functional brain imaging technique called "intrinsic optical imaging" to measure the neural responses of the rats' olfactory system to these odors. They also recorded the number of sniffs during odor sampling by implanting a small temperature probe in the rats' noses to measure the warming and cooling of air during breathing.

Median odor sampling times for 4 similar and 2 dissimilar pairs of chemicals stimuli ranged from 250 to 300 milliseconds. Accuracy on these problems was over 90 percent in all cases. When more difficult mixture stimuli were used, accuracy dropped for the most difficult mixtures but odor sampling times remained quite constant, increasing only 35 milliseconds from the easiest to the most difficult discriminations. The results were insensitive to odor concentration and other parameters of the task.

When the data was divided by odor sampling time, the scientists found that the rat's discrimination accuracy reached a maximum after about 200 milliseconds regardless of the difficulty. That is, a choice made in 200 milliseconds was about as likely to be correct as a choice made after 300 milliseconds or even 500 milliseconds. When odor sampling time was measured in terms of sniffs, it could be seen that maximum accuracy was achieved in just a single sniff.


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