Functional Brain Imaging of Human Olfaction

Functional brain imaging of human olfaction is limited by two primary complications: The stimulus is notoriously hard to control, and the neural substrates of olfaction occupy ventral brain regions that are highly susceptible to imaging artifacts. Nevertheless, functional imaging of human olfaction has yielded several discoveries. These include novel patterns of response such as functional lateralization in secondary olfactory cortex, novel neural substrates such as the cerebellum that was not previously implicated in olfaction, and novel models for olfactory coding such as dissociated representations for odorant structure and perception within subregions of primary olfactory cortex. We predict that solving the two aforementioned technical limitations will drive extensive research and discovery in this field.