A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience indicates that the sense of smell is significantly influenced by cues from other senses, whereas the senses of sight and hearing are much less affected.
A popular theory of the brain holds that its main function is to predict what will happen next, so it reacts mostly to unexpected events. Most research on this topic, called predictive coding, has only focused on what we see, but no one knows if the different senses, such as smell, work in the same way.
To figure out more about how smell relates to how we handle different sensory impressions, the researchers conducted a study with three experiments, two behavioral experiments, and one experiment using the brain imaging method fMRI at Stockholm University Brain Imaging Centre (SUBIC).
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