Background: Addiction as a mental disorder has large adverse effects on brain health. It alters brain structure and deteriorates brain functionality. Impairment of brain cognition in drug addiction is illustrated in many previous works; however, olfactory perception in addiction and in particular the neuronal mechanisms of it are rarely studied. Methods: In this experiment, we recruited 20 he...

Neuroimaging and in particular functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of olfactory function relies on the ability to model the time course of brain responses elicited by odor stimuli. In this study we compared two templates of olfactory brain activation by comparing levels of correlation in regions critical to olfactory processing with either a stimulation-based template or a perception-b...

Introduction: The performance in most smell identification tests is subjected to cultural variations. This study aimed to evaluate age, gender, and smoking-related effects on the test performance in the North of Iran.   Materials and Methods: The olfactory function of 1470 eligible subjects was assessed in this study. Moreover, this study evaluated the influence of age, ...

Many women report a heightened sense of smell during pregnancy. Accounts of these anecdotes have existed for over 100 years, but scientific evidence has been sparse and inconclusive. In this review, I examine the literature on olfactory perception during pregnancy including measures of self-report, olfactory thresholds, odor identification, intensity and hedonic ratings, and disgust. Support fo...

Olfactory abilities show a high degree of inter-individual variability and this could be partly related to personality differences. Here, in two studies, we tested a potential link between personality dimensions and olfactory perception. Sixty-eight (study 1) and a hundred and fifty-six (study 2) young adults completed the Big Five questionnaire and performed the Sniffin' Sticks test for assess...

Neuroscience research over the past few decades has reached a strong consensus that the amygdala plays a key role in emotion processing. However, many questions remain unanswered, especially concerning emotion perception. Based on mnemonic theories of olfactory perception and in light of the highly associative nature of olfactory cortical processing, here I propose a sensory cortical model of o...

Human olfactory perception is notoriously unreliable, but shows substantial benefits from visual cues, suggesting important crossmodal integration between these primary sensory modalities. We used event-related fMRI to determine the underlying neural mechanisms of olfactory-visual integration in the human brain. Subjects participated in an olfactory detection task, whereby odors and pictures we...

Olfactory processing in behaving animals, even at early stages, is inextricable from top down influences associated with odor perception. The anatomy of the olfactory network (olfactory bulb, piriform, and entorhinal cortices) and its unique direct access to the limbic system makes it particularly attractive to study how sensory processing could be modulated by learning and memory. Moreover, ol...

In the field of sensory perception, one noticeable fact regarding olfactory perception is the existence of several olfactory subsystems involved in the detection and processing of olfactory information. Indeed, the vomeronasal or accessory olfactory system is usually conceived as being involved in the processing of pheromones as it is closely connected to the hypothalamus, thereby controlling r...