Now imagine that as you keep walking, you pass a fish market. A worker has just thrown a box full of rotting fish parts into a waste basket.
Oooh! Whew! The smell is so bad, you take only a short breath and hurry on your way.
Anat Arzi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel imagined this kind of reaction recently when she performed sleep experiments in her laboratory. First, she made sure that her volunteers were in a deep sleep…no peeking …eyes tightly closed.
Then she opened a bottle of sweet smelling shampoo…and then…and this is important… played a soft musical note.
Then, she held something rotten under the volunteer’s nose …and played a different sound.
One of the best things about this kind of experiment is that it did not wake the volunteers. And when they were awakened, they had no memory of what had happened.
The next morning, after the people woke up, they thought the experiment was done. It was then that Anat Arzi played one of the sounds used while they were asleep and carefully measured their breathing. What she found was that the human brain, even while asleep, had learned to connect the smell with the sound.
This caused the patient to take a long, deep breath.
This caused a short intake of air.
So, what does all this mean? Ms. Arzi and her professor, Noam Sobel say it shows that we can learn while we are asleep. They may be the first scientists to use the sense of smell in this way as part of a sleep experiment. Their study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
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