Who smelt that?

Have you ever asked yourself what it would be like if you lose one of your senses? Or what would be your life experience if you were born without them? Though I’m sure most of us are thinking about sight or hearing right now, some people are born without sensations of smell. The condition is called congenital anosmia and is a lifelong inability to smell. For the most part, scientists ascribe the ability to smell to the olfactory bulbs in our brains, which are two small nerve endings that sit right between the nostrils and the brain. However, researchers have, by accident, discovered that some people define medical science.

When Israeli scientists conducted brain scans on people with normal ability to smell, they discovered a woman who had an abnormity in her brain. It was found during MRI scans that the subject had no olfactory bulbs in her brain, yet she was able to participate in experiments that required her to use her smell. For all that the scientists knew, that should have been impossible. Follow up tests were conducted with six hundred participants that would fit the attributes of the woman without the olfactory bulbs, and the scientist found two more women who could smell without the required brain structure.

With more test subjects, the scientists were able to create better comparison experiments, and they discovered that the women with the missing olfactory bulbs were not only able to smell, but their sense was also better than those with normally developed structures. All those findings disagree with the medial consensus that olfactory bulbs are responsible for transmitting smells to the brain. "Our understanding is that odors are essentially mapped on the surface of the bulbs," and the brain somehow reads this map, stated one of the scientist.  If you lack this map, you should also lack the ability to smell, he added. So how do these women do that?
One hypothesis here is that the brain has more plasticity, the ability to adapt and change through experiences, than initially fought. Even though the subjects were born without those important structures, their developing brains must have assigned the smelling task to some other parts. Another idea suggests that olfactory bulbs might not work as we fought they do. The researchers think that olfaction may be responsible for distinguishing where the smell comes from but no what it actually is. However, those speculations would need to be proven in further research.

Though we are left with unanswered questions, scientists were able to make additional observations that may help to design better research experiments in the future. All of the women with the peculiar ability were left-handed. The only reason why it was possible to find this medical mystery is that the original experiment did not exclude left-handed participants. Usually, those are left out because of different brain wirings compared to right-handed people.

- Posted by Gene (8)