Chemical Sensing: Smell, Taste, and Pheromones

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms and definitions related to chemical sensing, olfaction, taste, and pheromones, based on the Huberman Lab Essentials lecture.

Smell (Olfaction)

The ability to detect odors in our environment.

Taste (Gustation)

The ability to detect chemicals and make sense of chemicals put in our mouth and digestive tract.

Smell (Olfaction)

The ability to detect odors in our environment.

Taste (Gustation)

The ability to detect chemicals and make sense of chemicals put in our mouth and digestive tract.

Pheromones

Chemicals made by other human beings that powerfully modulate the way that we feel, our hormones, and our health.

Human-Made Chemicals

Chemicals that human beings make and release in things like tears, onto our skin, in sweat, and even in breath that powerfully modulate or control the biology of other individuals.

Volatile Chemicals

Particles of chemicals floating around in the environment; what we inhale when we smell something.

Amygdala

A central area of the brain associated with fear and threat detection; receives projections from olfactory neurons that respond to things like smoke.

Appetitive Behaviors

Behaviors that evoke a sense of desire and make you want to move toward something.

Olfaction

The most ancient sense that we have, closely tied to memory because of this.

Accessory Olfactory Pathway

This is what, in other animals, is responsible for true pheromone effects.

Vandenberg Effect

The effect where you take a female of a given species that has not entered puberty, you expose her to the scent or the urine from a sexually competent male, and she spontaneously goes into puberty earlier.

Inhalation

Enhances alertness in the brain, making it ready to pay attention; the act of this wakes up the brain.

Sniffing

The act of inhaling, sniffing, has a powerful effect on your ability to be alert, your ability to attend to focus, and your ability to remember information.

Smelling Salts

Stimuli that are mostly of the sort that include ammonia, it is a very toxic scent that triggers the pathway from the nose to the amygdala and wakes up the brain and body in a major way.

Cribriform Plate

The bone - the cribriform plate - shears those little wires off, and those neurons die; this helps gauge the severity and recovery from a head injury.

Basic Tastes

Five, but scientists believe there may be six things that we taste alone or in combination; these are sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami.

Umami

The name for a particular receptor that you express on your tongue that detects savory tastes.

Insular Cortex

The region of our cortex where we sort out, make sense of, and perceive various tastes.

Labeled Line

A unique trajectory to the neurons of the brain stem that control the gag reflex.

Coolidge Effect

The effect of a male of a given species mating and at some point reaching exhaustion or the inability to mate again; if you swap out the female with a new one, then the male spontaneously regains their ability to mate.

Vestigial

A kind of shrunken down miniature accessory olfactory bulb.

Jacobsen's Organ

Also known as the vomeronasal organ, it is thought to be responsible for the chemical signaling between individuals.