Researchers have discovered that giving names to odors not only affects our perception of them but how they are processed in our primary olfactory cortex, the area of our brains related to our sense of smell.
Participants were given minty and citrusy odors to sniff, which had been labeled with two words; for example, mint-menthol or eucalyptus-menthol. While sniffing, participants were scanned using an ultrahigh-field (7-tesla) functional MRI (fMRI) machine.
— Read more in Naming Scents: How Labels Shape Our Perception of Odors at Neuroscience News.
