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evening sitdown
Your evening longread: How our mind-boggling sense of smell works
It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
Turns out it’s pretty fascinating to learn more about smell.
(Nautilus, 10 mins reading time)
The reason why has to do with an intriguing feature specific to the olfactory system. That is, it takes only two synapses for information to travel from the air, through your nose, and to the core cortex, deep in the brain. To put this into perspective: two synapses won’t get you out of the retina in the visual system. You cannot find a more direct route bringing the brain in touch with the world!
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