Dr. William Hodos NACS Seminar: Dr. Donald Katz

A nose is not enough: rethinking the relationship between taste and smell

"Flavor," the term used to describe perception of taste-smell compound stimuli, more broadly refers to the complex interactions between multiple systems involved in deciding whether a substance in the mouth is worth consuming. This process is experienced by the organism as taste, and is therefore typically thought of as reflecting the influence of olfaction (and vision, etc) on taste perception. We show, however, the reverse direction of influence: primary gustatory (insular) cortex (GC) impacts the perceptual processing of odors. We go on to demonstrate that this involvement is specific to retronasal olfactory processing—GC impacts perception of an odor when a rat is specifically involved in making consumption-related decisions, and not when the rat is smelling an external object. In service of these phenomena, GC and primary olfactory (piriform) cortex (PC) couple into a processing unit for purposes of processing gustatory and retronasal olfactory cues. Despite the fact that mammals have noses and mouths, our data suggest that the central chemosensory systems may organize not by modality but by function -- one system for consumption and another for sensing the external world.

Dr. Donald Katz is a Professor at Brandeis University.

Dr. William Hodos NACS Seminars are free and open to the public.