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 Research & Giving News Article  In a recent U.S. News & World Report (February 28, 2005 ) article, three-time NARSAD researcher Dolores Malaspina, M.D., M.S.P.H., of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, discusses the role that smell plays in unconscious behavior. Columnist Marianne Szegedy-Maszak explores this and other issues in Mysteries of the Mind: Your unconscious is making your everyday decisions. Dr. Malaspina explains that the olfactory sense is the only one of our five senses that bypasses the thalamus and goes directly to the prefrontal cortex – the center of cognitive thought – and is therefore received by it with unfiltered intensity. She says, “Beginning with fetal development [our brains] are laid out to give precedence to olfactory perception.” Dr. Malaspina is examining the role that the sense of smell might play in mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia. Many schizophrenia patients suffer from social impairment, including an inability to read body language and interpret social cues. Research has also shown that people with schizophrenia often experience olfactory impairment, which involves dysfunction in the brain’s parietal lobes – the same part of the brain that processes the signals needed to correctly interpret social interaction. Says Dr. Malaspina, “What we are learning is that smell is a good window into the unconscious basis for sociability and social interest….There is a tremendous explosion of interest in this forgotten sense – and it was under our noses all the time.” |
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